Off the Books by Soma Mei Sheng Frazier (Henry Holt)

Every girl should have a grandfather like Mei’s. When she graduates from Dartmouth and faces a tight job market, it’s Laoye who buys her a sedan and persuades her to forgo the easy money of working as a rideshare driver. He’s the one who taught her to drive as soon as she was old enough to sit behind the wheel of a go-kart and he’s the one who sets her up with a woman who always needs a ride. So do her customer’s many female relatives, all of them with peculiar schedules and all of them turning out to be sex workers.

But then Laoye is no ordinary grandfather. He’s a devoted pothead with unconventional acquaintances who patronize his granddaughter’s ride service. Mei’s latest client is different--a conventional-looking handsome young Chinese guy with a Bulgari watch and the elegance of a GQ model. 

Henry Lee has hired her to drive him from San Francisco to Syracuse, all expenses paid. It would be the ideal gig except for one glitch. Her passenger carries a giant suitcase that he takes out of her field of vision at every rest stop and that he allows nobody else to touch. 

Mei stifles her curiosity and respects her customer’s privacy until the day he steps away from his burden to take a phone call, leaving his baggage halfway out of the car. When Mei pushes it securely onto the back seat, she feels something move inside it.

Is her passenger transporting smuggled wildlife? Is this something that could put an end to her livelihood and maybe even land her in jail as an accessory? Mei keeps her questions to herself until that night, when she hears voices coming from the hotel room next door--Henry and another person, both speaking Chinese.

At this point what seems to be turning into a standard rom-com novel takes a sharp twist into global politics and stays there. The person in the suitcase is a terrified child who has traveled out of China after her mother was imprisoned by the government. Her father is a professor who teaches at a university in upstate New York. His little daughter, traumatized, has begged for the safety of traveling in a gigantic suitcase. She and both of her parents are Uyghur, the oppressed minority of Northern China. 

If Laoye trusts Henry Lee, then Mei has no choice but to do the same. On the drive across the country, she, her customer, and Anna, the child who has chosen the safety of a suitcase, form a kind of family, with just enough potential danger and sexual tension to keep things interesting--but not interesting enough. 

Since many of the readers who pick up Off the Books may have no knowledge of what’s going on in Xinjiang, an autonomous territory of Northwest China where the Muslim Uyghurs are being forced to assimilate into mainstream Chinese culture, they have a lot of catching up to do. Soma Mei Sheng Frazier has done her homework and the information she ties into her novel eventually takes over and sinks the whole thing.

If you disdain the Crazy Rich Asians series for its frivolity and wish that romance novels would dabble in geo-political issues, this is the book you should take with you when you go to the beach. Otherwise pick up Tahir Hamut’s Waiting to be Arrested at Night (Asia by the Book, August 2024) along with the smart romance novel, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Asia by the Book, November 2023) and save yourself a bad case of literary indigestion.~Janet Brown

Shanghailanders by Juli Min (Spiegel and Grau)

Happy families are all alike, according to Tolstoy, but unhappy families are the ones who get all the attention. Starting with Cain and Abel and moving through millennia to the British Royal Family on Netflix in The Crown, dysfunctional parents and their children feed the imaginations of novelists and fill the shelves of libraries. 

But not every unhappy family is captured in fiction with the skill that Juli Min gives to the Yang family in her debut novel. Shanghailanders. Taking the threadbare formula of successful husband, unhappy wife, and three beautiful daughters, Min reveals these cliched figures  cleverly, in a series of interlinked short stories that move backward in time, from 2040 to 2014. 

While giving scant descriptions of Shanghai, Min provides a startling view of that city’s wealth, along with a capsule history of how swiftly this came into being. A man who was orphaned before he was in his teens, who grew up in a small, crowded apartment, sees an opportunity when he’s still at a university, borrows money from friends and buys several apartments. By the time he graduates, Shanghai’s rapid change has made real estate the arena where fortunes are made and Leo is a wealthy man.

His daughters are in good schools, with the two oldest in the U.S. His wife is an artist, Japanese by birth but with most of her life shaped by living in Paris. In addition to the home in Shanghai, the family has a country place, a house in Vancouver, a village house in Zhejiang, an apartment in Paris, an estate in Bordeaux. 

And yet as the years fly backwards, unhappiness settles in like a rot. Leo’s wife plans to leave him but her plans are set aside when she learns one of her daughters needs an abortion. His oldest daughter is a kleptomaniac who has made cruelty her second-favorite hobby. His youngest, at sixteen, has discovered a flair for sex work. His mother-on-law, teetering on the edge of dementia and living in a palatial assisted-living facility in France, has recently t been diagnosed with an STD. Leo “loved them, all of them,” but he has lost interest. Slipping into another life is a thought he occasionally entertains, but--”how tiring.”

Wrapping her novel in snatches of time, Min mercilessly dissects this family, through the eyes of people who work for them and through the moments that bring another crack in their perfection. When she finally takes her readers to where this family began, at Leo’s wedding, where he sees his bride as “the loveliest, most reckless person he knew,” what pervades this event is “Spirit, grief, memory, and that, too, edited and faded over time.” 

Min has created a joyless world, with characters who spend their  lives “dancing around the truth.” The elegance of her sentences, the precision of her descriptions, the way she gives life to even those characters who exist only in passing, all make Shanghailanders soar far above its soap opera possibilities, giving it the glitter and intricacy of a masterfully cut diamond set in bright platinum.~Janet Brown

Waiting to be Arrested at Night by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua L. Freeman (Penguin Press)

“No wall can stop the wind,” a Uyghur proverb says. Tahir Hamut Izgil knows this is true. In 1996, he is imprisoned for three years when Chinese authorities stop him as he leaves his home in Xinjiang to study in Turkey. Accused of “taking illegal and confidential materials out of the country,” this young poet has to rebuild his life when he‘s released just before the turn of the century.

He marries and makes a comfortable and secure living for his wife and two daughters as a film director for movies, television shows, and commercials. But his true vocation lies in writing poetry. Over the next twelve years, he nurtures this gift within a network of Uyghur writers.

Uyghur people have lived in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region for millennia, perhaps before the beginning of the Christian Era. Followers of Islam with presumably Turkish origins, most of them live in the capital city of Urumqi, as does Izgil. In recent years, the Chinese government has accused them of plotting separatism and when a spurt of violence erupted in Urumqi in 2009, the clampdown upon this ethnic group is swift and draconian. 

Mass arrests become routine, with Uyghurs accused of “fabricated crimes” and whisked away to re-education centers. Izgil is taken into police custody, extensively interrogated, and put under surveillance. 

In 2011, the government bans traditional Arabic greetings and orders people to change their names from those that have Islamic origins. The Chinese flag is raised over mosques and radios are confiscated and banned from sale. Inspections of mobile phones routinely ends in the arrest of the people who own them.

Izgil and his wife are called into police headquarters for fingerprinting, an ordeal that lasts three hours and includes taking blood samples, ‘voice prints,” and facial images. When asked about his religious faith, Izgil says he has none. When they’re finally released, Izgil’s wife, who has resisted any thought of immigration, says “We have to leave the country.”

They give away their copies of the Quran, they purge their phones and computers of anything that might be compromising, and they embark on a torturous, convoluted path that will lead them from their homeland. A Uyghur academic is given life imprisonment under accusations of separatism. Izgil keeps warm clothing and thick footwear by his bedside in case the police come to take him away in the middle of the night.

“I wish China would just conquer the world,” one of Izgil’s friends says bitterly, “Then we would all be the same…not alone in our suffering.” Another says in a poem, “We came from nowhere else and we will not leave for anywhere.” Not long after Izgil and his family emigrate to the United States, this man is sentenced to 16 years in prison.

Once they are safely in another country, Izgil calls his parents but not even this message of reassurance goes unpunished. Soon after this, his mother’s phone and ID card are both confiscated. 

As they make another home in a strange place, “we burn with guilt,” Izgil admits, “Our bodies might still be here but our souls are still back home.”

Although this memoir is eloquent and illuminating, its narrative is told under a different timescape, twisting with personal history, conversations that are scrupulously detailed, and a wealth of poems. Reading it gives not just another perspective but a whole new form of psychology, one that was constructed to survive a world that could well have been invented by Kafka, one that readers are privileged to experience at a comfortable distance.~Janet Brown

Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang (Random House)

In 1978 a Taiwan manufacturer set up the Taiwan Handbag Factory in an isolated corner of Guangdong Province. It was the only foreign factory to have come to the small town of Dongguan, a place that had no railway connections and no roads. It hired local labor but soon needed to augment that supply with migrant labor from rural China. Two years later Deng Xaoping established the first  of China’s Special Economic Zones in Shenzhen, fifty miles from Dongguan. 

By the 1990s, Dongguan became a manufacturing hub, with factories for electronics and computer parts taking their place with the ones that made toys, clothing and shoes. It became famous for its “factories and prostitution,” a city “built for machines, not people.” Instead of streets, it boasted ten-lane highways.

In 2004, Leslie T. Chang, a bilingual reporter for the Wall Street Journal, came to Dongguan. Her goal was to report on migrant labor in that city, a tsunami of workers who had been streaming to its factories for two decades. She stayed in Dongguan for 1-2 weeks every month for two years.

A young woman herself, with a fluency in Chinese, Chang found it easy to gain the confidence of young women who worked in the factories, who at that time made up 70% of the labor force and one-third of the migratory flow. Homeless until marriage, by virtue of their gender, these girls were never considered permanent parts of their family households. When parents realized their daughters could become financial assets in factory towns, they encouraged the girls to take that leap.

Chang follows the lives of two girls, Min who left home at 16 and Chunming who came to Dongguan when she was just a year older. Through them she chronicles the progress that could be made by girls who have left their villages.

Although social pressure may have sent these girls to work in factories, what kept them there was freedom and mobility. If they disliked their workplace, they changed jobs, going to “talent markets,” places where job fairs met speed dating. Rapid-fire interviews were conducted to find workers who were “female, pretty, and single,” the younger and the taller the better. Lies and subterfuge were common, girls who lost their  identity cards and procured another went by a new name for as long as that was necessary. Men were less desirable job candidates in this fast-paced employment arena and were usually confined to maintenance positions, while young women found their way into office jobs.

Within a year, Chunming went from making 300 yuan a month to 1500. Min, after having her identity card, mobile phone, and her money stolen from her, went from living on the streets to “building a new life from scratch,” getting a job in a Hong Kong-owned handbag factory where her salary was high enough to make her the dominant figure in her rural family.

Factory girls were the leaders of a social revolution. The money they brought to their parents gave them a position of power. At the Lunar New Year, they were the ones who gave envelopes of money to their elders and household decisions rested with them. As they gained positions of status in the workplace, they often outranked the men they dated and used that power to their advantage. Chunming’s stock phrase when finding a man didn’t measure up to her standards was “Let’s just be friends, then,” which she often pronounced in a matter of minutes.

Pragmatic and ambitious, these girls set personal goals that dominated their time away from their jobs. Chunming kept a diary and studied Ben Franklin’s Thirteen Rules of Morality. When direct sales came to China, promising a route to prosperity, speaking skills were a path to success and young women flocked to classes that gave them that ability. English was so in demand that the Taiwan-owned Yue Yuen plant that manufactured Nike, Adidas, and Reebok, offered English classes onsite at their gated facility, a place that also had a kindergarten, a movie theater, and a hospital.

Girls who had come from small farms found they needed polish to achieve success and went to “academies” that told them how to dress, eat, smile, pour tea, use the telephone, and when it was necessary, how to drink. (“Do you know how to make cocktails?” one of Chunming’s friends asked Chang.)

Chang wrote Factory Girls twenty years ago. It prompts a deep curiosity about what became of these upwardly-mobile, ambitious young women and if their effect on society continues to hold its power. A sequel is screaming to be written, if only to continue the stories of those indomitable girls, Min and Chunming. ~Janet Brown

Other Rivers by Peter Hessler (Penguin Press)

Of all the books I’ve read about the Covid years, whether they are fiction or memoirs, there’s only one I would ever reread. This is one that was written in 2020, Wuhan Diary by the sixty-five-year-old author, Fang Fang (Asia By the Book, December 2020). First published online from January to March of 2020, then translated into more than twenty languages, including English, and published by HarperCollins, this journal showed the day-by-day progression of the virus and the means by which it was suppressed, described in deeply human terms. For me, nothing else has measured up to Fang Fang’s reportage, for which she has been almost erased. She is no longer published in China and her name can no longer appear in that country’s press, nor can she be interviewed by any outlet. Despite this silencing, she remains hopeful, telling another writer, “I believe it won’t be like this forever.”

In his latest book, Other Rivers, Peter Hessler fails to reach the standard set by Fang Fang, although he was also living in China at the time she published her writing. A man who first came to China in 1996, and has lived and worked in that country for over ten years, he returned in the autumn of 2019, with his wife (Leslie Chang, author of Factory Girls, who has matched her husband’s duration in China) and their nine-year-old twin daughters. 

Hired by Sichuan University in Chengdu, Hessler is greeted with a sardonic observation. Noting that he came to work in Cairo just as the 2011 Arab Spring with its subsequent massacres began and then returned to the US just in time to see Trump win the 2016 election, a writer at a dinner party predicts that with Hessler’s return to China, “something bad is probably going to happen.” Within three months, Covid erupts in Wuhan.

As a journalist, Hessler had a stunning opportunity to bring this time to life and at times he does that. His account of his daughters’ introduction to Chengdu Experimental Primary Elementary School where they were the only foreign students and the only ones who had no knowledge of the Chinese language, is fascinating, although given less attention than it might have received. The interruption that Covid imposed is perhaps partially to blame but the girls had a full year in the school after that. At the end of the book, Hessler admits his children’s time in a Chinese public school was the most challenging part of our time in Chengdu,” something a reader would never guess from his accounts of that “challenge.”

To be fair, he has a few challenges of his own, ones that are prompted by what seems a lot like naivete. Since English language classics are available in Chengdu, there are a wide assortment of books from which to choose, so it seems peculiar that Animal Farm is one of the two texts chosen for his class on English Composition. Instead of glossing over Orwell’s political satire, Hessler teaches it in tandem with 1984, a recipe for disaster.

In his nonfiction class, he decides to turn its center-point to journalism, sending his students out into the city to observe and report. When one of his students does a profile on her VPN dealer, Hessler identifies this as “edgy research,” but then has her read it out loud in front of the class. “I wasn’t sure if Yidi’s subject matter was too sensitive,” he says, “...by the time she was halfway finished, I was convinced that I had put her at risk.” Considering his “over ten years” in China, this seems negligent to the point of stupidity.

Later, when Wuhan is no longer under lockdown, Hessler visits and interviews Fang Fang, although this is forbidden. But why worry? By the time this is published, he’s back in the US. At the end of March, 2021, his request for a contract renewal is denied by Sichuan University and he and his family return to the peace of rural Colorado.

A writer without a selectivity index, Hessler has no ability to focus. Everything he has ever seen or experienced he tosses in a gigantic salad, recounted in a random fashion that is painfully staccato. His return to the city and the students that he depicted in his first book, River Town, is thrown into his time in Chengdu, no doubt in an effort to increase the page count in Other Rivers. Although he achieves over 400 pages, at least half of them could have been cut to make this a better book, presenting an inevitable question. Where was his editor? ~Janet Brown

Lords of the Rim by Sterling Seagrave (Corgi Books, out of print)

If you want to grasp the vertiginous changes that have swirled into being since the final decade of  the last century, Lords of the Rim could have been a fine place to start. A political analysis of the power and influence of the Overseas Chinese, heavily balanced upon the past history of China with fleeting glimpses of the present, author and historian Sterling Seagrave launches this with statistics that were doubtless cutting-edge in the early 1990s but are threadbare now. An empire of 55 million Chinese who live and work in the countries of the Pacific Rim with a GNP of $450 billion and liquid assets “as much as $2 trillion” are an economic force in the development of China underpin this book but readers are tossed into a dubious frame of mind when they are confronted with these facts thirty years after Seagrave put them on his pages. How can these still be valid after the Asian financial meltdown of 1997, the handover of Hong Kong and its subsequent political upheavals, the booming world of high tech that has made smartphones a necessity all over the world, and the effects of SARS and Covid-19? 

Because his thesis is a shaky one at this point  in time, Lords of the Rim is only worth reading now if it’s approached as a work of history. Since Asian history is Seagrave’s area of expertise, and his bibliography at the back of this book shows a stunning amount of research, this could be enough to justify reading a book in 2024 that was published in 1995. Unfortunately, it’s not.

Beginning his narrative long before the birth of Christ, Seagrave swiftly moves through Chinese dynasties to show why the North and the South of China have traditionally been in opposition, with the North holding the rulers and the South being a hotbed of entrepreneurism. With merchants being on a low rung of the Confucian hierarchy, it was an easy matter to expel them from the reaches of power, banishing them to live below the Yangtze. Southern China became a sort of prison colony, far from official regulations and near the sea. Maritime trade was a logical step for the exiled merchants.  They found routes to Southeast Asia that became lucrative and later made their way to Arabia and parts of Africa. Long before the advent of the Silk Road, southerners had become wealthy from spices and silks and as dynastic upheavals racked the North, the South became a refuge and an opportunity for the merchant class of China, not a punishment.

Although they weren’t scholars, these businessmen were far from illiterate--and their choice of reading material wasn’t the Analects of Confucius. It was Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Realizing that “business is warfare,” they adapted Sun Tzu’ s classic instruction manual to serve as “The Art of Wealth,” with gratifying results.

As their voyages became an integral part of the Southern Chinese economy, they established trading centers in the countries with which they did business, and since these new expatriates had no interest in local politics and no desire to colonize, they met little opposition from their host countries. But through business, these new residents gained secure toeholds as pawnbrokers, making loans to the locals with property as the collateral. As dynasties rose and fell, with accompanying turmoil, the overseas outposts became attractive places to live and by the 17th Century, there were significant communities of Chinese living in Japan, the islands of Indonesia, the Malay peninsula, and Siam. When the merchant pirate Coxinga, half Chinese, half Japanese, chased the Dutch from Taiwan, that became another alluring alternative to dynastic uproar and gradually the Overseas Chinese became an “invisible empire.”

Seagrave is masterful in recreating the history of China but that only takes up one-third of his book. He then plunges into the 20th Century history of the Chinese in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Thailand in a kind of intellectual Cliff Notes. Overstuffed with too many names, too many cataclysms, and too many business enterprises, his book becomes a tiresome slog and sinks under an excess of information. Ending with the death of Deng Xiaoping, he hints at a backlash against “commercial corruption” and a threat of “economic collapse.” “Where it will stop, nobody knows,” he concludes.

Sterling Seagrave knew. He lived until 2017. It’s a pity--and quite annoying-- that he didn’t care enough to publish an updated version of Lords of the Rim, with fresh insights provided by a new century.~Janet Brown

Written on Water by Eileen Chang (New York Review of Books)

There are some books that wait for the right moment to be opened, bought with good intentions, only to sit on a shelf for months. Last winter I brought home a collection of essays, realized I wasn’t in the mood for any of them, and almost forgot about this purchase. When I picked it up this week, I fell into a conversation with a twenty-something who was born over a hundred years ago, a writer whose fiction had always intimidated me but whose essays were pure enjoyment.

Author of Love in a Fallen City and Lust, Caution, Eileen Chang admits that her novels are “rather diverting but also more unsettling than they should be…I like tragedy and, even better, desolation.” She approaches her characters with an analytical distance that’s scaldingly honest and devoid of tenderness. Although I’ve always been stunned by her talent, I’ve never read her work with pleasure--until I opened Written on Water and was immersed in delight, envy, and agreement. 

Chang had me hooked with her essay,  Peking Opera through Foreign Eyes, where she asserts that ignorance of its subtleties only increases the enjoyment. If the audience isn’t aware of how it should be performed, then it’s free from niggling criticisms and can simply be caught up by the pageantry and spectacle. As an ignorant and passionate devotee of Chinese opera who has sat on a sidewalk for hours to enjoy outdoor performances of this artform, thrilling to the “sharp, anxious tattoo of percussion” that punctuate the “kicks and jousts and feints,” I began to love the mind of Eileen Chang. When she went on to say “Chinese people like the law, and they like breaking the law too…by way of trivial violations of the rules,” I remembered the times I saw this happen in Beijing and embarked upon a silent conversation with Chang as I read. And when she discusses “the chamber pot strategem,” when the soul of a dead man is imprisoned in a chamber pot, I knew this was a plot device that could only be created by people who had intimate knowledge of an outdoor privy (or as we called this in Alaska, an outhouse).

At this point I was ensnared by Chang’s wit, frankness, and her unflinching curiosity. She wrote these pieces before she turned 25, after the publication of her first novel, and they’re filled with the viewpoint of someone who’s still in love with discovery. She describes street scenes with the same relish that she does women’s fashions and confesses that her love of city sounds means “I can’t fall asleep until I hear the sound of trams.” She gives a vivid character sketch of her best friend with an intimacy that she denies her fictional subjects and she brings a poignant dimension to the fall of Hong Kong with the memory of “how we scoured the streets in search of ice cream and lip balm” in the midst of “chaos and destruction.”

The bleakness and distance of Chang’s fiction becomes understandable when she writes about her father, a man surrounded by “clouds of opium smoke.” “When he was lonely,” she says, “he liked me.” In a luxurious setting, Chang’s childhood is Dickensian in its privations, which she recounts in the spirit of “There’s very little to remember so nothing is forgotten.” She’s far too ironic--and much too cerebral-- to lapse into drama.

Chang skillfully reveals her love of China, as she writes about its daily life, its art, its music. “I am Chinese,” she says, “so I know how to appreciate noise and clatter…If I were to choose, I could not bear to leave China: I’m “homesick even before I leave home.”…” Ten years after these words were published, she left. In 1955, Chang moved to the U.S. and five years later she took U.S. citizenship. She died alone, in Los Angeles, a death that makes Written on Water all the more precious and deeply sad.~Janet Brown

Coming Home Crazy by Bill Holm (Milkweed Editions)

With ten rooms of books and over 3,500 sections, Powell’s City of Books has filled a city block in Portland, Oregon for the past fifty-three years, and  claims to be the largest new-and-used bookstore in the world. It certainly is one of the most enticing, with its shelves filled with surprises and its cavernous rooms somehow managing to feel cozy. A trip to Powell’s is always a treasure hunt and it’s impossible to stick to a book budget when browsing in that place. 

On a recent expedition, I made it to only two sections--Travel Literature and Asian History--and left with a book bag that strained at its seams. Among my purchases was a book whose title had always intrigued me but that I’d never read, Coming Home Crazy by Bill Holm. 

Anyone who has lived anywhere in Asia, with the possible exception of Singapore, is going to come back to the West feeling a wild disorientation that verges on insanity. Holm cites The Crackup, where Scott Fitzgerald said he knew he was crazy when he couldn’t look at two opposing ideas at the same time. China, Holm says, has the opposite effect, as a place that makes it impossible to ever “see again singly.” People who return from the Middle Kingdom come home with a “bifurcated consciousness.” The antithesis to “every idea in your life and culture looks as sane and reasonable as the idea itself--” and sometimes even more so.

Although this beginning hints at a work of comparisons and contrasts, what follows is a collection of essays that follow a strange sort of alphabetical order, with a scrambled sense of time. After living with a language that can’t be alphabetized, Holm is delighted to point out the random nature of the A to Z classification. By beginning with an essay on AIDS and ending with a piece that explains the Chinese custom of zou houmen, (“going through the back door” to get a desired result), he creates a crazy quilt of unrelated patchwork pieces.

The only way to read this book is to ignore the alphabet. Holm offers suggestions that might give his readers a narrative thread but his choices are as idiosyncratic as his structure. After floundering in attempts to find a beginning, middle, and end, readers may find themselves wishing that Holms had simply published the journals that these pieces seemed to have emerged from.

Nevertheless, within the chaotic tumble of anecdotes and impressions there’s some very good writing and a Picassoesque portrait of what one city in China, Xi’an, felt like to a displaced Midwesterner from 1986-1987. 

As a “waiguoren,” a Western foreigner, Holm was an object of curiosity, one that was inexplicable and fascinating. Reluctant to learn Chinese because it would strip him of his adult authority and take him back into childhood, he salutes his Chinese students in their study of English because they “exhibit a kind of courage” that he lacks himself. Swiftly he falls in love with the idea of teaching people who value books and are delighted to encounter English literature--”Whitman, Thoreau, Yeats…It was all candy, all delight.”

Holm is less than delighted with the frugal and Spartan comforts of his life in China but  he finds an essential dimension in how the people find “celebration in their daily lives.” The ritual of making dumplings is one he explains step-by-step, from buying pork and vegetables in the market, to chopping, stuffing, and shaping in the company of friends in a home kitchen. Eating them is “a mountain, a dinner party, close to gluttony” and a sacrament of pure pleasure.

Pleasure is the hallmark of Holm’s essays. According to him, Nixon wasn’t the one who opened China to the West. Walt Disney did. Sunday evening was when people clustered around TV sets to watch Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and the gang cavort in an hour of cartoons.

And under a government of rigid control with a bloody history that would re-erupt on June 4 in 1989, Chinese people, Holm claims, are “anarchically free” so long as they avoid actions that are overt. The small regulations of daily living are freely and happily ignored in a society that he sees as operatic, “the Asian Italy.”

It would be interesting to go to Xi’an in 2024, decades after Holm spent his year there, to see how many of his observations still ring true. Carried as an anti-guidebook, his collection of impressions and opinions could launch explorations that may prompt surprise, delight, and a whole new attack of “coming home crazy.”~Janet Brown

Searching for Billie by Ian Gill (Blacksmith Books)

Louise Mary Newman, Marylou Newman,  Louise Gill, Billie Lee—with so many different personas for one woman, no wonder her son found it a challenge to find who she really was. Since his mother handed Ian Gill in his infancy to a baby nurse in Shanghai, proclaiming “That was the end of my mothering days,” the eventual reunion between Billie and Ian was undoubtedly a bit difficult for both.

The enigmatic and dazzling figure whom Ian struggled to understand began life in true fairy tale fashion. A stranger left her at the front door of an Englishman and his Chinese wife, a couple living in Changsha. Pretty and smart, Louise Mary, called Mary Lou throughout her girlhood, was destined for great things, her father told her, right up until the moment that he left his family for another that he had established

At sixteen, in a household that was now close to destitution, Mary Lou left her expensive school in Shanghai that her mother could no longer afford and began a career that would eventually take her to the greatness her father had predicted. In time the infant of unknown parentage would be given an MBE by Queen Elizabeth, becoming a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

Gill painstakingly recreates his mother’s eighty-nine years of life in almost agonizing detail. Beginning with her father’s parents emigration from England to Hong Kong and following the bureaucratic career of Billie’s adoptive father far more diligently than is necessary, at last he begins to unfold the meteoric rise of his mother’s colorful life. A woman who was friends with Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s closest adviser, the American adventuress Emily Hahn, and the Chinese author Lin Yutang, Billie’s brilliance caused her to rise from secretary to a position of international importance and kept her alive through imprisonment in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation of that city.

Gill’s family history flares into a fascinating narrative when he describes the circumstances that led to his birth. In the harsh conditions of Hong Kong’s Stanley prison camp, Billie, now the wife of a British soldier, went through a living hell when her young son died. As she began to recover, she was certain her mental health depended on having another child.

An affair with a handsome journalist brought about a pregnancy. Billie, despite severe malnutrition, carried her baby to full term, throughout her time at Stanley, onto a ship that would carry her to New Zealand after the Japanese surrender, and into a Wellington hospital. There she gave birth to the baby she had longed for, an event she never would have survived if she had still been within the confines of the prison camp.

Billie’s astounding luck pervaded her entire life and coupled with her brains, brought her to an impressive career at the United Nations. However intimate relationships weren’t her specialty. Although she had several long and devoted love affairs, none of them were permanent. And although Ian was a byproduct of her stunning ambition and determination, their bond only becomes close after Billie’s son grows to adulthood.

Searching for Billie is a book that demands persistence. It sinks under unnecessary details and lingers far too long upon family members who are extraneous. However through the slog, Billie shines like a submerged diamond, irresistible and worth all the effort it takes to rediscover her life.~Janet Brown

Where Strange Gods Call: Harry Hervey's 1920s Hong Kong, Macau and Canton Sojourns (Blacksmith Books)

Before Fu Manchu, the Dragon Lady, the Yellow Peril, and the benign cliche of Charlie Chan, there was Harry Hervey. A young prodigy who published his first piece of pulp fiction when he was sixteen and whose stories were frequently found in Black Mask magazine after his early debut, Hervey published his first novel at the age of 22. Caravans by Night: A Romance of India was followed a year later by The Black Parrot: A Tale of the Golden Chersonese and apparently gave Hervey a financial windfall that took him to the part of the world that he had profitably imagined.

In 1923, Hervey voyages to Hong Kong where he immediately begins his search for corners of that city that would be “rich in the atmosphere of Cathay.” Fortunately for him, he has a local contact, a wealthy, cultured Hong Kong resident whom he had met in New York. Chang Yuan becomes Hervey’s guide and mentor, giving him an introduction to “a race that had always seemed inscrutable to me.” Together the two explore the “nauseous effluvia” and “fetid gloom” of Chinese opera theaters, the “gorgeous wickedness” of Macau’s gambling halls, and make the acquaintance of the “queer, impassive little dolls” who sing in restaurants as wealthy gentlemen have their suppers. “It was inevitable,” Hervey says, “that we should visit an opium house,” a place he finds “as colorless as naked lust.”

In between these forays into the parts of Hong Kong that Hervey finds “very wicked and very pleasant,” Chang Yuan delivers interminable lectures on Chinese history and politics. These are so meticulously recorded that it becomes impossible to believe they’re not the puerile thoughts of Hervey himself. This theory is almost confirmed when Hervey describes Chang as “uncommunicative,” which would preclude his monologues that take up many of the pages in his Hong Kong chapters.

Without Chang Yuan’s companionship, Hervey seems daunted by Canton, which he describes as “too stupendous and too indefinite to be sheathed in words.” He certainly doesn’t explore it with the enthralled energy shown by Constance Gordon-Cumming, forty-four years earlier. However he has a focus for this visit. Fascinated by Sun Yat Sen from childhood, he manages to gain an audience with his hero, whom he terms the Doctor of Canton, a man whose “personality submerged words.” The words recorded by Hervey speak of the threats posed by Europe and Japan and of the “militarists of the North (who) wish to Prussianize China.” The interview ends with Sun Yat Sen declaring the necessities of having only one currency and one language shared by all Chinese, which Hervey later dismisses as “splendid dreams.”

This reprint of two chapters from Hervey’s Where Strange Gods Call: Pages Out of the East seems a peculiar choice for Blacksmith Book’s new series, China Revisited. Hervey’s writing can barely qualify as travel writing, steeped as it is in his fictional fantasies and thinly veiled racism. “How pleasant I was (sic) to see soldiers who were not yellow,” he gushes when passing a group of British troopers and Chang Yuan is described as “astonishingly well educated…faintly grandiose.” Not even his childhood idol escapes the snobbery of this high school-educated product of Texas, who charitably reports Sun Yat Sen’s perfect enunciation “was not surprising, as he is a college graduate.” It escapes Hervey that even the sing-song girl who entertained him with a song in Pidgin English is bilingual, which he himself, in true American fashion, probably is not.

Perhaps when all of the choices for this series of attractive little books are published, Harry Hervey, who later became a Hollywood screenwriter largely because of his presumed knowledge of Asia, will take his place among them without making readers wondering why. Let’s hope so.~Janet Brown

Wanderings in China: Hong Kong and Canton, Christmas and New Year 1878-1879 by Constance Gordon-Cumming (Blacksmith Books)

Constance Gordon-Cumming was in her fifties when she first came to Hong Kong on Christmas Day in 1878 but her reactions to this city, and later to Canton, had the enthusiasm of a young girl who had just left home for the first time.

This was far from the case. Gordon-Cumming had been a devoted traveler for twenty years, making her first overseas voyage when she entered her thirties and sailed to visit her sister in India. From there she had gone to Ceylon, Fiji, New Zealand, and Japan before she had set her sights upon China. Although at this point she had seen enough of the world to view it with a jaded vision, this wasn’t her style. An artist who had the goal of ending “never a day without at least one careful-colored sketch,” she looked at the world with hungry eyes that took note of everything she saw.

Gordon-Cumming fell in love with Hong Kong’s “steep streets of stairs” that led past “luxurious houses encircled by “camellias and roses and scarlet poinsettias.” Bamboo groves and banyan trees, the intertwining of the city’s Chinese and Portuguese areas, the piercing blue water of the surrounding harbor—”Only think what a paradise for an artist!”

Paradise went up in flames that night when Christmas festivities were interrupted by an act of arson that threatened to consume the city. Perched above the conflagration in a Mid-Level home, Gordon-Cumming watched the fire as it destroyed Chinatown and advanced upon the affluent homes of Hong Kong’s expatriates. Ten acres of the city were devastated with 400 houses gone in a single night, an unimaginable spectacle with “a horrible sort of attraction…so awful and yet so wonderfully beautiful.”

By New Year’s Day, Hong Kong’s “social treadmill” had resumed and by January 9th a short voyage takes Gordon-Cumming to Canton. There she’s met by a “resplendent palanquin” that was fit for a mandarin but lay in wait to take her to her hostess on the Western enclave of Shamian Island. Delighted by the English social life that held sway in this community, she refuses to succumb to its charms that keeps many foreign residents of Shamian from going into the heart of Canton.

Instead Gordon-Cumming submerses herself in the city’s shops and markets, on streets with names that are “touchingly allegorical”—The Street of Refreshing Breezes, The Street of One Thousand Grandsons. She’s overwhelmed by the commerce that she finds there—flowering branches for Chinese New Year, oranges that have been peeled because the peels, used for medicine, are more valuable than the fruit, ivory carvers, tallow-chandlers, vendors that sell drinking water next to porters that transport raw sewage. (Tea drinking is the pervasive custom because the water for it has been boiled, she observes.)

From there she is taken to Canton’s riverine world where a separate city exists. Families live in domestic comfort on boats, with order preserved by “water police” who are notoriously corrupt. Crafts that hold barbershops and medical clinics serve this community, along with market boats and river-borne kitchens. Floating biers carry corpses to their final destination while other vessels hold leper colonies. Gordon-Cumming, with aplomb befitting the daughter of a British baronet, finds her way to the “flower boats” that she euphemistically describes as places where dinner parties are attended by wealthy citizens who are entertained by “singing-women.”

From Canton she travels to Macau, a place she finds “most fascinating” but so “essentially un-Chinese that I have decided to omit the letters referring to it.” This decision does quite a bit to illuminate Gordon-Cumming’s character and helps to explain the decision that ended her life of travel. A year after her time in Canton, she remained aboard a ship that evacuated its passengers when it ran aground. Refusing to leave the watercolors she had painted on the voyage, she stayed with the captain until the two of them were finally brought to safety.

Did her explorations come to an end because she was unnerved by this disaster or was she blacklisted by shipping companies because she refused to take to the lifeboats when that command was given? Somehow I doubt that this conclusion to her travels was Gordon-Cumming’s idea and I’m sure she fumed over it for the rest of her life.~Janet Brown

The Dragon's Pearl by Sirin Phathanothai (Simon & Schuster)

In 1956, as the Cold War took on lethal proportions, Thai politician Sang Phathanothai sent two of his children to China. This was a clandestine and potentially dangerous move for everyone concerned, one that was inspired by the ancient custom of tribute paid by one nation to a greater power. Phathanothai saw the Korean War as a Chinese victory against the United States and although Thailand had fought as a US ally in that war, he felt it was essential to establish ties with the People’s Republic. In the sort of byzantine politics that Thailand specializes in, he convinced Thailand’s prime minister that if by giving his children to China under extreme secrecy, an act that would go against US interests if it were ever disclosed, he would create an indissoluble bridge between the two countries.

When they leave for China, Warnwai is a twelve-year-old boy and his sister Sirin is only eight. Wai is old enough to carry the responsibility that he takes on when he is designated as a representative of Thailand’s Prime Minister, a task that gives him a connection to his homeland and fosters his ability to keep careful records of his meetings with Chinese officials. Sirin, an indulged and pretty little girl, has no such weight placed upon her. For her this is a bizarre vacation in a country where she has no maids to wait upon her and where the house they were to live in compares sadly with their Thai home that had twenty rooms on three floors and four gardeners to tend a profusion of orchids.

The two children are placed under the guardianship of Zhou Enlai, China’s premier who’s second only to Mao Zedong, a decision that Wai understands and records as fully as he’s able in careful notes and a daily journal. Sirin quickly succumbs to Zhou’s legendary charm and swiftly begins to think of him and his wife as her new parents. Equally delightful and much more accessible is Liao Chengzhi, a high-ranking official whose father was American-born and who has an informality that brightens Sirin’s new life.

Although she lacks the diplomatic skills that her brother had been schooled in, Sirin learned early in life that to gain the attention she wanted, she needed to be attentive as well as beguiling. By the time she went to China, she had absorbed a rudimentary political understanding that she brings to bear in conversations with Zhou and Liao. But while Wai absorbs these conversations as an observer, Sirin takes them to heart. The advice she receives from her Chinese “fathers” lets her adjust to the sacrifices of The Great Leap Forward and the precursor to the Cultural Revolution that flourishes briefly in 1957. When she learns that her father has been arrested in Thailand, she clings even more tightly to the relationships she’s forged with the men who are now her protectors.

Their Chinese lives aren’t easy to relinquish because of the secretive nature that has pervaded them from the beginning. in 1967 Mao’s wife Jiang Ching begins to strengthen her power by nurturing the seeds of the Cultural Revolution. Her Red Guards ransack Liao’s home and issue thinly veiled threats against Zhao. It’s the wrong time for Sang Phathanothai to come to China at last, bearing a conciliatory message from the US government. His children know the danger this action carries. Their father does not. When he makes the message public and then departs, he leaves Wai and Surin unprotected, their contact with Zhou Enlai cut off.

Wai defends his father and is expelled from China. Surin, alone and defenseless, says “Wai’s world was not disintegrating. Mine was.” Officials tell her “You have to choose your own destiny. Denounce your brother.”

To survive in a country that is going mad, Surin publicly denounces her family on a radio broadcast, an action that does little to soften her life in the years to come. Her life is caught in the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, where her brains and charm just barely keep her safe.

Her story is a devastating account of a time that China has done its best to erase from its history, an era that has inescapably shaped Surin’s life. Despite an escape that is close to miraculous, she has never been able to leave China completely, a country that is more her home than the one she was born in. The Dragon’s Pearl, told with the acumen and objectivity that kept her alive in a perilous time, is a balanced look at a country few understand and many fear.~Janet Brown

Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong (Sceptre)

Qui Xiaolong was born in Shanghai, China and went to the United States in 1988 to write a book about T.S. Eliot. Then in 1989, The Tiananmen Square Massacre happened, so he decided to remain in the U.S. to avoid persecution back home. 

Death of a Red Heroine is the first book in his series of crime novels featuring Police Inspector Chen Cao who works for the Shanghai Police Department. Cao was a rising star in The Communist Party of the Republic of China and was on the road to become a diplomat. Unfortunately, one of his uncles was found to be a counter-revolutionary so he was assigned to his current position.

In Communist China, even if a distant relative is found to be a counter-revolutionary or if some relative had committed a crime, no matter how minor, it can affect one’s standing in getting a promotion or not. Chen was lucky. Although he was considered “an educated youth” who graduated from high school, he was not sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution “to be reeducated by poor and lower-middle peasants”.

Fortune seemed to smile down upon Chen as he was assigned his own apartment, which was another social problem of living in Shanghai. During Chen’s housewarming party, he received a call from his colleague, Detective Yu Guangming. The body of a young, naked woman was found in a remote area of a canal.

Chen is head of the “special case” department and does not usually deal with homicide cases. However, Detective Yu had informed there was nobody else to handle the case that particular day so he went out to investigate it. Normally, their squad didn’t have to take a case until it was declared “special” by the bureau, usually for an unstated political reason. 

It had been four days and still no one filed a missing persons report. Chen was still contemplating taking the case or not but decided to ask his friend who is also the medical examiner who did the autopsy to give him a detailed description of the victim. Once he got the information, he faxed it along with a picture of the deceased to various units and surprislingly got a response the following week. 

The picture was recognized by a security guard at the Shanghai First Deparment store. The woman said she was going on vacation but had not returned. He showed the picture to the people who worked with her and they all recognized her. Her name was Guan Hongying. “Guan for closing the door. Hong for the color red, and Ying for heroine”. “Red Heroine”. Chen remembered her name. She was a National Model Work and a Party member. 

However, this was the only information that Chen and Yu had but Chen decided that their branch would take the case. He informed his superior that he would treat it as any homicide case and because the victim was a well-known celebrity, he would keep her name out of the news and press. 

As their investigation progresses, it leads them to their number one suspect - Wu Xiaoming, a son of a powerful Communist Party official. People like Wu Xiaming are informally called H.C.C., High Cadre’s Children. They often behave as if they are above the law and that no one can touch them because their parents are in a position that puts fear into the lives of normal people. 

Once Chen Cao’s superior became aware of who their number one suspect was, a lot of pressure was put on them to deter them from continuing the investigation. Chen knows that it is best to tow the Party Line but he cannot in good conscience give up the investigation although he knows that he could be relieved of his duty or worse yet, be taken off the force. Will Chen Cao tow the Party’s line or will he continue the investigation knowing the results might put an end to his career?

It’s not hard to imagine the Republic of China putting the government and the Communist Party first and foremost above everything else. I also imagine the H.C.C. are quite similar in attitudes to children of diplomats, especially embassy kids, which I have had the misfortune of having to deal with when I worked retail. But if there are more people like Detective Chen Cao in China, then I do see hope for China’s future. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo (Henry Holt and Company)

“I exist as either a small canid…or a young woman. Neither are safe forms in a world run by men.” Snow, however, is well equipped to defend herself whether she takes the form of a beautiful woman or a fox. Unfortunately her daughter is not. When the fox cub is captured by a photographer to sell on the open market, the baby is easily broken. By the time Snow finds her, the child is ready to die.

Now Snow is out for revenge, taking her human form to find the man who is responsible for her baby’s death. Her quest takes her to the home of an old woman whose son is a photographer and who knows the murderer. This old woman is attracted to something within Snow, an indefinable quality that reminds her of a fox she encountered long ago in the northern grasslands. She hires this enigmatic beauty to be her maid servant and companion.

Bao is an elderly man who long ago was taken to a fox shrine to save his life and ever after is a lie detector in human form. He can immediately distinguish truth from lies the minute the words are spoken. “Truth is a green garden hedged thickly with bamboo that he can’t escape.” He uses this blessing and curse in his work as a detective, a job that puts him on the path of a beautiful young woman who might be a fox. While on his hunt, he always keeps an eye out for the woman he loved when he was young, a girl who claimed she had once been rescued by a fox.

The Fox Wife suddenly becomes a mystery based upon myth, where three foxes find each other, all of them linked through time, history, love, and tragedy. Yangsze Choo makes them not only plausible, but absolutely possible and completely desirable. “We make our living beguiling people,” Snow says and anyone who picks up this book is certain to be beguiled.

Ancient Chinese stories, Choo explains in notes at the end of her book, were augmented by footnotes and in this book, she had wanted to include footnotes written by Snow. Instead she gives tidbits of information sprinkled throughout her novel and within her closing notes. Foxes are recognized as magical shape-shifters in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, beings that are capable of pursuing a thousand-year journey toward becoming celestial foxes. While on that journey they are known to humans as spirits, demons, and gods. 

First mentioned in the Shanhaijing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), a work of Chinese literature that dates back to the 4th Century B.C., foxes were believed to have the power to become a woman at fifty, a beautiful woman or an adult male at one hundred, with the ability “to know things more than at a thousand miles distance.” They could use sorcery to kill or to “possess and bewilder,” and often were the presiding spirit of villages.

Even without these historical facts, Snow’s story is skillfully interlaced with Bao’s in a novel that’s poetic, romantic, and steeped in adventure. Trapped in neither mystery nor fantasy, The Fox Wife brings a new depth to fiction, along with a yearning for a sequel—with footnotes.~Janet Brown

Falling Leaves : The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter by Adeline Yen Mah (Broadway Books)

Adeline Yen Mah’s book Falling Leaves is the story of her life. It is the true story of growing up in a family where she tries her best to please her father and step-mother but nothing she does changes their apathy towards her. It is a heart-breaking story of family bonds and how those ties are often broken. 

Adeline Yen Mah was born into a very wealthy family in a city just north of Shanghai, China. Her mother died a couple of weeks after she was born. She was only thirty-years old. Her dying words were to Adeline’s Aunt Baba, “I’ve run out of time. After I’m gone, please look after our little friend here who will never know her mother”. Adeline has no idea what her mother looked like, she has never seen a photograph of her. 

In 1930’s China, men were expected to have a wife while women were “expected to sublimate their own desires to the common good of the family”. In the past there was a double standard between men and women. Single girls who were not married by the time they were thirty often remained single for the rest of their lives. Men, on the other hand, were expected to take at least one wife, regardless of his age. 

Adeline’s father was thirty-years old. He was the president of his own company. He had properties, investments and other successful businesses. He decided he would now do something to please himself. While driving around with his sons he spotted a woman who he became totally infatuated with. Her name was Jeanne Virginie Prosperi. She was the seventeen-year-old daughter of a French father and Chinese mother. 

He eventually marries Jeanne and had the family call her 娘 (Niang), another term for mother, as the other children often talked about their deceased mother and called her 媽媽 (Mama). As Niang became a part of life, great changes would come, and nothing would be the same again. 

It is now 1988 in Hong Kong. Adeline Yen Mah’s family had all gathered together for the first time in almost forty years. The only person who was absent was Adeline’s youngest sister, Susan. The occasion was for her father’s funeral and reading of his last will and testament. 

At the end of the will, the solicitor said, “It is my duty to inform you that I have been instructed by your mother, Mrs. Jeanne Yen, to tell you that there is no money in your father’s estate”. 

It was this reading of her father’s will which was the catalyst for Adeline to tell her story. She and her siblings could not believe that their father died penniless. Adeline Yen Mah says she had to go back to her Grand Aunt and grandfather’s time to explain why this came to be.

Adeline Yen Mah’s bittersweet memoir of a happy childhood turned nightmare is heartbreaking as it is inspiring. It’s a story of finding one’s identity and the search for the most important things in life - acceptance, love and understanding. I believe it’s a goal we all strive for and for those of us who have it should count our blessings. ~Ernie Hoyt

Beijing Sprawl by Xie Zechen, translated by Jeremy Tiang and Eric Abrahamsen (Two Lines Press)

To country boys in China’s distant provinces, the ones who drop out of school and have no skills, Beijing is where the money is.  Opportunities in the capital are “like bird shit--it would spatter on your head while you weren’t looking and make you rich.”

Four boys have come from the same village to Beijing, where they live together in a room that holds only four bunk beds and a desk.  The rooftop is their living room, where they meet at the end of their work day. Sitting on stools, they drink beer, eat donkey burgers, and play cards, surrounded by a city that “spreads quick, like a tropical jungle.”

They all have the same job, pasting ads on empty walls night after night, making just enough to pay the rent for their room and to buy food for their rooftop meals. They’re young enough that this seems like fun--the oldest is twenty and the youngest only seventeen. But they know that life in Beijing for people like them is a “young person’s game.” While they can still be romantic, falling in love with girls whom they see at a distance and dreaming of forming a rock band, they’re well aware that their city life has an expiration date. They see it as it claims older people who came from their village to find wealth but watched their dreams die instead. 

One of these men works on construction sites, “wiping out everything that isn’t a skyscraper,” while back in his village his little son calls every man “father,” since he has never known the man who deserves that name. Another patches a car together, building it from scrap that is discarded in the garage where he works. It looks ridiculous but it runs and when he drives it to work, it draws customers to the shop and eventually leads to vehicular homicide. 

Occasionally Beijing succumbs to an attack of “urban psoriasis” when street vendors and the boys who paste ads become the itch that the cops are told to scratch. The cleanup brings an enforced leisure that turns into gang fights where different factions arm themselves with whatever they can find. “Sticks, iron coal shovels, furnace tongs,” all become weapons and one boy dies from tripping over the sharpened blade of a hoe and cutting his own throat. 

Boredom is a dangerous occupation. From their rooftop, the boys become enraged by the barking of a neighbor’s dog that is chained up nearby. First they tease it and then become more purposeful. What begins as a game turns into cruelty and then death. 

Even good intentions turn into tragedies. A young man who lets himself worry about a little girl who begs on the street is lost forever in his attempts to take her to safety. Another who falls in love with a girl whom he only sees when he peers through the window of a tavern ends up back in his village, a drooling idiot. 

“I’d sell blood twice for that,” one boy says after treating his friends to a restaurant meal. But in fact, all of these lost boys sell their blood every day in a different form, as they scrabble to keep their expiration dates at bay. They know that, for lives like theirs, there are no happy endings. Their stories are bleak and beautiful, stark and laced with humor, interlocking to form a novella that just might break your heart.~Janet Brown

The Woman Back from Moscow by Ha Jin (Other Press)

Yan’an, 1938: Two young women study the dramatic arts in the place where Mao Zedong brews the ideas that will lead to China’s liberation in ten more years. Both women have recently appeared on stage, with Yomei in the starring role and Jiang Ching taking a secondary part. The older of the two by seven years, Jiang Ching, is ambitious and competitive. Yomei at seventeen is an incandescent beauty, glowing with life and in love with the theater.

The older woman’s jealousy is apparent but Yomei is under Zhou Enlai’s guardianship and knows she has nothing to fear. The daughter of a dead revolutionary, Yomei became Zhou’s adopted daughter when she and her mother moved to Yan’an. Already powerful, Zhou’s cloak of invulnerability shelters the girl he has taken into his family, leading people to call Yomei The Red Princess.

The community of rebels in Yan’an is small and closely knit. While Mao is a man that Yomei is familiar with, Jiang Chang has to work to gain his attention. Yomei receives Mao’s permission to study drama in Moscow for seven years and Jiang Chang uses every advantage she possesses to become Mao’s indispensable helper and eventually his wife. 

When Yomei returns to Yan’an after struggling to survive in Russia during World War II, she has turned from being an actress to becoming a director. Steeped in seven years of theater arts training in Russia, where Stanislavsky has transformed the way plays are interpreted, Yomei has soaked up everything that her teachers could give her. Her intelligence allows her to enter into the heart of every play she directs and her enthusiasm and generous way of teaching others makes her a charismatic figure. Combining that with her fluency in Russian, her sophistication from her years in another country, her relationship with Zhao Enlai and his wife, and her glowing beauty, she is irresistible.

Jiang Chang, on the other hand, has become Madame Mao, China’s First Lady. She’s eager to use Yomei to her own advantage but Yomei has learned to be wary of politics. Seeing that Jiang Chang plans to use culture and the arts to increase her own power, Yomei keeps her distance.

Ha Jin has taken the life of Sun Weishi while giving her the name she called herself when she wrote letters to close friends and family, Yomei. “Reality,” he says, “is often more fantastic than fiction.” His research to uncover the truth in Yomei’s story carried him only so far, There were gaps in her life that he was forced to create, rather than recreate, so he calls this work a novel instead of a biography. 

As he carries Yomei through seven hundred pages, he brings her to life as an artist who had the power to enchant everyone she met, except for the woman whose goal was to “crush her spirit and destroy her beauty.” Slowly Ha Jin uncovers the politics that led to the horror of the Cultural Revolution and the insane power of the woman who brought it into being. What was at first the story of art and beauty becomes an inexorable tragedy of power and twisted political decisions that darkens the second half of this novel, as it does Yomei’s life.

Born In China in 1956, Ha Jin was a child during the Cultural Revolution and its tragic consequences. He came to the U.S. as a student of American literature in 1985 and made his decision to stay after the Tiananmen Massacre. A poet and a novelist, he writes his poems in Chinese and his novels in English.

In a book as lengthy as The Woman Back from Moscow, this is both an advantage and a handicap, especially when he writes dialogue, where the language becomes stilted. However, this slight lapse in facility simply accentuates the Chinese reality of the thoughts and words and actions that spawn terrible forces and engulf the life of a brilliant and beautiful artist.~Janet Brown

The Apology by Jimin Han (Little, Brown and Company)

Jeonga Cha is an unlikely heroine.  Not only is she a sprightly 105, within the first few pages of The Apology, she’s dead. But neither of those factors get in her way. Immediately she launches into the story of her life, one that’s both charming and duplicitous.

Jeonga has secrets, ones that she’s never disclosed to her sisters, Mina,the oldest at 110, and Aera who’s 108 but boasts the most beautiful hair in the family. These women have learned to coexist through their “territorial intuition and quest for harmony.” These traits show up primarily in the colors they choose for their clothes, which never clash. Otherwise the sisters often do, with Jeonga usually being the one who prevails.

“An epilogue is what I wanted in my own life,” she tells herself but when one turns up, it isn’t particularly welcome. A letter arrives from the U.S., addressed to Mina. Since Jeonga is the only sister who’s fluent in English, the language used by the letter’s writer, she’s the one who’s given the task of reading it and then relating its contents to her sisters.

As she makes her way through the English words, she uncovers a bombshell, the kind that works well in a Shakespearean comedy but much less so in ordinary life. Two separate branches of the Cha family had emigrated to America several generations ago, branches so separate that they were unaware of each other’s existences. Now through an annoying twist of fate, the great-grandniece of Jeonga’s vanished sister, who had long ago defected from the family home in Seoul to North Korea, and Jeonga’s own great-grandnephew both have chosen to attend Oberlin where they meet, fall in love, and are happily planning their wedding. This, Jeonga decides, is a scandal and she must prevent these cousins from marrying.

The backstory of this problem is rooted in Jeonga’s secrets and she’s damned if she’s going to let her sisters in on any of those hidden details. Still Mina and Aera are as determined as their baby sister. Even with the falsified details of why Jeonga is taking an unexpected flight to the United States., the other two insist on going with her.

The comedy becomes convoluted but quite delicious as the old women bicker their way across the Pacific and into a luxurious hotel in San Francisco. Jeonga’s hidden past unfolds as she casts her memory back upon it and the suspense of how she will solve the family dilemma without involving her sisters heightens and then swiftly dissolves when she has a fatal encounter with a moving bus. 

Now what? 

At this point, the author switches gears so thoroughly that The Apology becomes two separate narratives. Jeonga in a murky version of the bardo state roams through the afterlife, unsure that she will ever be able to forestall the catastrophe that continues to simmer in the world of the living. Unfortunately anyone who’s still reading this novel begins to feel unsure as well and gradually begins not to give a hoot.

A delightful beginning turns into a mass of tangled storylines and none of them lead to a satisfying conclusion. “All’s well that ends well,” Shakespeare insisted but a felicitous ending needs a better underpinning than what’s served up in The Apology. 

With luck, Jimin Han’s next novel will concentrate on these three centenarian sisters because they steal the story when they stand together. They’re far too marvelous to leave stranded as they have been in what becomes an annoying and unsatisfying attempt at fiction.~Janet Brown

Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City by Jane Wong (Tin House)

Jane Wong is in college when she learns about the Great Famine, also known as the Great Leap Forward. When she looks at the dates of this tragic era in Chinese history, she realizes that when her grandfather said his family had “disappeared,” and told her how he was adopted by a man whose family had also “disappeared,” that in truth the “disappeared” had starved to death. Wong, who has never gone hungry, races from the classroom in the grip of a panic attack, “heaving tears as thick as wheat.” 

Too respectful to breach her grandparents’ “chosen silence,” Wong pieces together bits of information as it falls in conversational crumbs. “What happens,” she asks, “when your archive is a ghost?” Her reply to herself is “I have no choice but to let food haunt me.”

During the pandemic, she learns to make jook, that supreme comfort food, and dreams of the day when she’ll be able to make it for her grandmother. Later she learns that on the day she made jook for the first time, her brother has done the same thing. A dish that “at its simplest core” is only rice and water holds the secret and power of a sacrament, comforting and connecting.

Wong needs comfort and connection. Although her mother and her grandparents feed, nurture, and love her, her father truly has “disappeared.” A man who gambles away the restaurant he owned and leaves his wife to support two children, the father gives his children only a collection of memories—the trips to the casinos of Atlantic City. There he parks his family in a squalid hotel room for days while he plays all night “in that red-velvet world of his.” After he loses everything he has, he buys a ping-pong table that’s meant to keep him at home but he and his friends eventually begin betting extravagantly on the matches. And then he vanishes.

Wong’s mother was the “village beauty,” who came to America for an arranged marriage with the wrong man. When she gave birth to her daughter a year after the wedding, she looked at the baby and said “She knows too much.” But even as she works two jobs in the wake of her husband’s abandonment, she fosters her daughter’s intelligence and takes pride in her beauty. 

Although this book has “A Memoir” emblazoned on its cover, it’s a collection of essays, deeply personal and fluid, not linear. Wong is a poet  and her poetic art burnishes the  language of her narrative. She discloses the rage that filled her childhood home and that still burns within her when she thinks about her father. Her stories of the other men who have left her are told with agonizing honesty and she illuminates her mother with a love that’s almost blinding in its clarity, empathy, and truth.

She tells how it was to leave Hong Kong after living there for a year as a Fulbright Scholar, flying to Iowa, where she’s accepted in the legendary Writer’s Workshop. Trading the smells of soy sauce eggs and sweet egg waffles for the odors that waft toward her in a Midwestern airport, reeking of “old carpet and recycled air,” Wong realizes that she’s no longer surrounded by Asian people. In fact she is “the only Asian person” to be seen and she “immediately felt unmoored.”

Now the author of two volumes of poetry and a university associate professor, she asks “How did I get here, glistening with all this nourishment?” These brilliant, shining essays show every step of Jane Wong’s emotional odyssey, and “memoir” will never be the same again.~Janet Brown

Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang (Flatiron Books)

“Practice erasing and overturning and re-creating the self until all I have to do is disappear.”

Daiyu has been doing this all of her life. Born to parents who named her after a doomed woman in an ancient story, she is a loved and cherished little girl until the day her parents disappear. Her beloved grandmother tells the twelve-year-old girl that she too must vanish, so the captors of her parents won’t come back to take her away. Cutting Daiyu’s hair and dressing her in the clothing of a boy, her grandmother gives her a boy’s name, Feng, and sends her off to a distant city. 

As Feng, Daiyu becomes a boy, finds work as a calligraphy master’s servant, and begins to learn the characters on her own. The Four Treasures of the Study become her implements: the inkbrush, inkstone, inkstick, and paper, and she’s taken on as an after-hours student at the master’s school. One day, while exploring the city streets alone, she falls into the hands of a stranger who drugs her, puts her in a dark room, and holds her prisoner for almost a year. During that time, an old woman comes every day to teach her English and when she has learned enough, her abductor covers her body with tar and stuffs her into a basket filled with coal. “You’re going to America, to a place called San Francisco. If anyone asks, tell them you came from New York.”

But nobody asks. Instead the girl is taken from the ship as soon as it docks, is stripped naked, put into a barracoon, and is quickly purchased by a Chinese brothel owner. She’s given a new name, Peony, and eventually is assigned her first customer, a young boy who helps her to escape.

Once again her hair is cut, she’s dressed in men’s clothing, and is given papers that declare she is Jacob Li. Taken to Idaho where Chinese labor is needed, Jacob Li lives there for three years, never once betraying his true identity. Working for two Chinese shopkeepers,  Jacob struggles with his attraction to a young Chinese man who teaches the violin. The only feminine part of Jacob is the ghost of the woman with whom the girl he once was allowed to be shares a name. Lin Daiyu’s spirit is sheltered within the body of Jacob Li, as hidden as Daiyu herself.

Then the violence begins, with the white townspeople united against the Chinese residents, and suddenly “being Chinese is something like a disease.” When the Rock Springs Massacre is reported in the Idaho newspapers, a tragedy begins to unfold and a story that has the tinges of a romance novel becomes an account of terrible history.

In 2014, Zhang says in an author’s note, her father was driving through a town in Idaho where he saw a sign that said a “Chinese Hanging” once took place there. Five Chinese men accused of murdering a white store owner had been strung up by a mob of vigilantes. Later Zhang began to research the facts behind this brief account. The more she learned, the more she “wanted to tell the story, not just of the five Chinese who were hanged, but of everything--the laws, tactics, and complicity that enabled this event and so many others.”

Through Daiyu, Zhang tells this story in the form of a fable anchored in history. Through her different names and selves, Daiyu embodies the Chinese women who were forced into American brothels, the Chinese men who looked for work under identities that were not their own, the Chinese business owners who were forced to leave everything they had painstakingly built, the Chinese who faced death at the hands of white mobs. 

Four Treasures of the Sky is a smart and compelling novel that’s almost impossible to put down. Once it’s finished, it clings on, with sorrow and a terrible unveiling of whitewashed truths.~Janet Brown