Ordinary Disasters by Anne Anlin Cheng (Pantheon Books)

“Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.” This piece of wisdom,, originally spoken by Aristotle,  has been claimed by St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of those rigorous Catholic educators, the Jesuit order, and by Valdimir Lenin, founder of the Russian Communist Party. This unlikely triumvirate recognized a basic truth: children are irrevocably shaped by their first seven years of life. 

Anne Anlin Cheng lived in Taiwan until she was ten years old. Although she outwardly assimilated within the United States to the point that when her grandparents came from Taiwan for a six-month stay when she was twelve, she had little to say to them. English had outstripped the languages she had spoken with them only two years before, putting “a language barrier between my grandparents and me.”

And yet assimilation, Cheng says, is a matter of covering over differences to fit within another culture, “a shell game.” The “forces of family, of race and culture” that shaped her are Taiwanese, which she realizes most often in her marriage to a white native-born American. Their racial differences are alive “in the pockets of everyday intimacies.” 

America lumps these differences into the category of “Asian. ” Quoting another writer, David Xu Borgonjon, Cheng points out “You can only be Asian outside of Asia.” A “scholar of race and gender,” Cheng attends a meeting at her university that’s held for Asian and Asian American staff “in response to the rise in violence against people of Asian descent.” Within a matter of minutes “ethnic and national differences” take over, showing the artificiality of the “Asian” label.

The common thread uniting people from the continent of Asia is the racism and stereotype that’s been fostered by three centuries of America’s “cultural and legal discrimination.” When this resurfaces during Covid, as virulent as the physical virus, Cheng begins to explore the elements of racism that fill her life.

Shortly before Covid struck, Cheng was diagnosed with cancer.  Slowed by her fight against this disease and by the enforced isolation of the pandemic, she’s confronted with “unabashed racism sweeping our country,” which leads her to examine what she calls “ordinary disasters” and others call microaggressions. She finds them in her everyday life, in her profession, and in her history, exploring what they are and their relentless effects in this collection of personal essays, all of them blazingly smart and mercifully free of academic language. Scathing, tender, funny, and wide-ranging, these pieces turn a harsh magnifying glass on the ways U.S. culture and behavior chips away at what it calls “a model minority.”

An article in the New Yorker entitled Where the Future is Asian and the Asians are Robots leads Cheng to observe the close similarity between the stereotypical “China Doll” and the female cyborgs portrayed in contemporary cinema. When a relative gives her daughter an American Girl doll who is fashioned after a child in colonial Williamsburg, Cheng examines the role that dolls play in reinforcing white supremacy. She links Joan Didion’s essays with their “exquisite study of whiteness” to the Modernist Orientalism of Marie Kondo, pointing out that Didion’s obsession with self-control is closely related to Kondo’s rigid rules of orderliness. Both, she says, elevate efficiency and organization to “the status of Virtue.”

Cheng grew up in Georgia where Atlanta had the aura of “a multiracial heaven.” Her parents made the six-hour drive from Savannah frequently to buy ingredients at a Japanese grocery, eat at a “decent” Chinese restaurant, and browse at a Chinese bookstore. Then in 2021, “that Atlanta happened.” A white man killed six women “of Asian descent” who worked in “Asian-owned spas.” The killer was characterized as a man who “was having a bad day.” The murdered women were commonly and immediately assumed to be sex workers. “Let me name the victims,” Cheng says, and gives their ages. The youngest was 33, the oldest 74, all of them dead because of “racialized misogyny.”

Cheng ends her book with the universality of old age and death. “Aging is itself an incurable illness,” she says, pointing out the irony of “that even as you own more and more of yourself, your body is becoming less and less yours.” Her voice that’s explored the “ordinary disasters” underlying America’s undying racism illuminates the end that comes to us all, with the same strength and clarity that’s identified cancer and racism as “diseases of the most cellular level,” malignant and deadly.~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

Ghost Town by Kevin Chen, translated by Darryl Sterk (Europa Editions)

Keith Chen has escaped from Yongjing, the rural village in Taiwan where he grew up, a place so small that the only privacy the inhabitants know is found in the secrets they carry. Secrets, Keith learns early in life, breed violence. “We never held you,” his dead father tells him in a ghostly confession that no human can hear, “We hit you instead.” 

In Berlin, secrets haunt the lives of Keith and T, the man who wants to marry him but is constrained to a domestic partnership by German law. Unable to answer the questions his lover asks in the one language they share, Keith writes down what T wants to know, in stories that T is unable to read. T’s own secret emerges in acts of sadism that culminate in his death. His murderer goes to prison and when Keith is finally released, he returns to his village and the four sisters who survived their childhoods. 

Ghosts are commonplace entities in Yongjing: the woman who haunts a deserted bamboo grove, Keith’s father whose death fails to remove him from his family, the most beautiful of Keith’s sisters whose lush body encloses an aridity that drives her to suicide.  But when he returns, Keith discovers his own ghostliness, moving through a changed landscape, where odors provide his only orientation and his sisters prove to be his only anchors.

Kevin Chen tells this story through the voices of the dead and the living, each one unfolding a narrative that’s brutal, steeped in sensory details that rarely make their way into fiction, relieved by surprising bursts of humor and quick flashes of beauty. Every voice rings out with its own individual timbre, carrying its own particular burden of memories. Slowly secrets come into the open, bit by bit, until the facts appear in stark truth, losing their power once they’ve been told.

Ghost Town is a shocking novel in the way it toys with its readers’ emotions, while maintaining a stoic and matter-of-fact unveiling of its details. A child striptease artist becomes an unlikely savior; a girl is punished by witnessing her grandmother kill her dog and serve it as the family dinner; a nouveau riche mansion is described in satirical detail, right down to the waterbed that’s filled with “melted snow from the Swiss alps.” In prison Keith takes comfort in knowing that he’s “small fry compared to some of the guys” with whom he’s acting in a version of Hamlet. “The guy who is playing Ophelia in drag killed three people. Another of the Hamlets killed five. I only killed one.” Then there are the sisters, each one of them a small masterpiece of sibling rivalry, coming together “like bacon in a skillet…I know where your scars are, you know where I hurt…The sisters kept turning on the heat.” And it’s doubtful that any reader will fail to be surprised by what emerges at the story’s end.

Everyone in Yongjing, ghosts and survivors, exist outside of the world at large, “in a time zone all of their own.” The dead, observing the present, often seem more alive and aware than the living, who carry the weight of the past. As Chen asks in his Afterword, “Do you become a ghost only after you die? Or can you qualify as a ghost while you are still alive?” It’s a question that taunts and haunts, one that will keep this novel alive long after its last page has been turned.~Janet Brown

Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao (Bloomsbury Publishing)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Foreigner by Francie Lin (Picador)

The Foreigner, published in 2008, won the Edgar Award for the Best First Novel by an American Author for 2009. An award given by the Mystery Writers of America. It is written by Francie Lin, a Taiwanese American. The novel is set amidst the seedier side of life in Taiwan. It is a tale of sibling rivalry and coming to terms with one’s roots. A story of family and tradition, but is also the story of crime, murder, and death.

Emerson Chang is a financial analyst living with his mother, a Taiwanese immigrant, who is the owner and proprietor of a motel called the Remada Inn. Emerson was born and raised in the States and can’t speak a word of Chinese. He is forty years old. He’s also single….and a virgin.

Every Friday evening Emerson has dinner with his mother at a local Chinese restaurant called the Jade Palace. Today is Emerson’s birthday. His mother has also invited a single woman to join them. Emerson’s mother is a very traditional Chinese woman and wants Emerson to get married and start a family with a nice Chinese girl.

The last thing on Emerson’s mind is marriage. He was in love once, with a woman twenty years his senior. Of course his mother didn’t approve.  She also wasn’t Chinese. This evening Emerson begins to resents his mother’s meddling and brings up his younger brother, Little P. Little P left the home and went to Taiwan after the death of their father. Emerson hasn’t seen his brother in almost ten years. Bringing up Little P’s name upsets his mother who abruptly leaves the restaurant. 

Once Emerson gets back to the motel where he and his mother live, Emerson decides to confront his mother and tell her that he will not be manipulated by her anymore. Unfortunately, he finds his mother on the floor. She is taken to the hospital where Emerson first learns that she has stage four cancer and doesn’t have long to live. 

The Foreigner gets more complicated after Emerson’s mother’s death. According to his mother’s last will and testament, his mother has left the motel to Little P while Emerson is left some property in Taiwan. His mother also had one additional request - to have her ashes interred in Taiwan. The lawyers have been unable to get into contact with Little P so Emerson decides to kill two birds with one stone by taking his mother’s ashes to Taiwan and visit Little P in person to inform him of their mother’s passing and about his inheritance.

When Emerson visits his younger brother, he is greeted by a knife at his throat by a man that looks pretty up. The man turns out to be Little P! After exchanging a few awkward words, Emerson tells Little P that their mother had left the motel to him after her death. The only thought Little P had was how much money he could make by selling it. After a few more unpleasant exchanges, Emerson realizes that Little P is in trouble and feels it's his sense of duty  to help him. 

The more Emerson tries to help Little P, the further into Taiwan’s criminal underworld he goes. Emerson finds that Little P works at a small karaoke bar run by their uncle where Emerson meets a couple of his cousins, Poison and Big One, who are not the friendliest of relatives. Emerson also spots a woman at the karaoke bar and nobody will tell him who she is. It seems there is more to the karaoke bar that meets the eye and there also seems to be a secret Little P is hiding. The longer Emerson spends time with Little P, the more he feels the need to help save his little brother. But does his little brother really need saving? 

What secret is Little P hiding? Why does Emerson not give the papers for Little P to sign to hand over the motel? And who is that little girl who seemed like a little frightened waif? As Emerson begins putting all the pieces together, what he discovers will shock him and us, the readers as well! ~Ernie Hoyt

The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

“My father liked to declare he had moved us to Alaska so we could be closer to the stars.” Taiwan was a “junk island,” a place he’d left because there he had nothing, “no family and no land.” His wife carries a different story. She has a village, a father, a home that waits for her across the Pacific Ocean. Standing on mudflats that border a Pacific inlet, she tells her ten-year-old son Gavin “if you cut a slanted path through the water, you could end up on the eastern shores of Taiwan.”

Gavin’s father brings the stars close enough that sometimes they feel like “a rope of warmth in the cold air.” He carries home books from library sales that he buys for a dollar a crate, and fantasizes about the neighborhood that will spring up around the isolated house he’s rented for his family in the wild country that borders Alaska’s largest city. As he spins dreams, his wife mounts sentry against the moose that invade her front yard, guarding her children “with a piece of steel pipe in her hand.” She salvages whatever she can to feed her children: lily bulbs, bloody pork bones, a broken fishing net.

Buffeted between a dreamer and a survivor, Gavin drifts, unanchored. He has no memories of Taiwan and no footing in a place where the ground under his feet “could turn watery...like quicksand.” Stricken with meningitis, he comes back to recovery with the knowledge that his baby sister Ruby has died from the disease he brought home from school. “It’s no one’s fault,” his sister Pei-Pei tells him but he doesn’t believe her. When his baby brother Natty asks where Ruby has gone, their mother replies “Ruby is still lost. She can’t find her way home.”

Ruby’s unexamined death clings to the family’s house like a thick fog; Gavin, Pei-Pei, and Natty find refuge outdoors, following a long path through “the endless white spruces,” discovering a house with two other children. While Pei-Pei and Gavin each find a different form of friendship with these new comrades, Natty roams through the woods alone, looking for his lost sister. 

Within their own walls, the silence grows heavier with new dangers that only Pei-Pei understands. A family “vacation” ends with a return to a locked house that is no longer theirs and slowly Gavin understands that his father’s dreams can’t protect him, that his mother’s talent for scavenging is the children’s only lifeline.

“It was a kind of violence, what my father had done,” Gavin realizes when he finally travels to his mother’s village in Taiwan. “He had brought us to a place we didn’t belong, and taken us from a place where we did. Now we yearned for all places and found peace in none.”

With deep sadness and language of shimmering beauty, this haunting debut novel shows how the danger of an Alaskan wilderness pales next to the savage wilderness of a displaced family and the universal wilderness of unspoken loss, undeserved luck. ~Janet Brown

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin (Little Brown)

This is a fairy tale inspired by the author's travels through Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China. The hero of our story is a young girl named Minli. She lives in a small house with her mother and father in the shadow of a large mountain. All the villagers call it Fruitless Mountain because nothing grows on it and no animals or birds make their home there. Minli's family is very poor, as are most of the villagers.  

Although Minli is a child, she is always smiling and ready for adventure. The villagers thinks her name (which means quick thinking) is well suited to her. Sometimes her mother thinks it suits her too well. What makes Minli happiest is hearing her father tell her stories of far away lands, of magic and dragons, of imagined worlds where anything is possible. One of her favorite stories that she likes to have her father tell is how Fruitless Mountain got its name. Minli loves this story and always asks her father what could be done about the barren state of the mountain to which her father always answers, “That is a question you will have to ask the Old Man of the Moon.”

Minli believes her father's story and asks him where she can find the Old Man of the Moon. He tells her that it’s been said he lives on the top of Never-Ending Mountain. Then Minli has a great thought. She tells her father that if she could find the Old Man of the Moon, she could ask him how to change the family's fortune. This time the mother scolds the father for putting such ridiculous thoughts in their daughter's head.

The next day is not an ordinary day. A goldfish seller walks through town calling out “Goldfish. Bring good fortune into your home.” Minli asks the man how a goldfish can bring good fortune to which the man replies, “Don't you know? Goldfish means plenty of gold. Having a bowl of goldfish means your house will be full of gold and jade.” Minli has two copper coins given to her when she was a baby and without another thought, runs back home and offers them to the goldfish man. He only takes one coin and gives Minli a bowl with a goldfish in it. When she brings it home, her mother is not pleased, saying it’s just another mouth to feed.

Minli thinks about what her mother said and sneaks out at night to set the fish free. She sighs just like her mother and says out loud if she can only go to Never-Ending Mountain, then she would be able to ask the Old Man of the Moon how to change her family’s fortune. As she is about to head home, the fish speaks  and says it can show her the way to Never-Ending Mountain.

This is how Minli's true adventure begins – starting with a talking goldfish, then meeting a dragon that can't fly, and having to solve riddles to find her way to Never-Ending Mountain where she can ask the Old Man of the Moon her question. Will she get there? Will her family's fortune change? Are there really talking goldfish and dragons? Only one way to find out--finish reading the story!~Ernie Hoyt

Taiwan Tattoo by Brian M. Day (ThingsAsian Press)

Jack, a university-educated Canadian slacker with an overly protective and enabling older sister, finds himself fired by his brother-in-law from a job he hates. With no plans for his future, on a whim he takes a job in Taiwan teaching English.

His story is quite similar to a satirical comic strip written in Japan, Charisma Man. This comic pillories the young Western men who come to Japan to teach English and find that their new stature is elevated far above the one they enjoyed in their home countries. At home, they're nothing special but in a foreign country they find that local women want to date them, their pay is usually good so they have money to spend, their rooms or apartments are subsidized so they pay low rent or no rent. All of this gives them a false sense of being someone with clout.

Jack is like many of these Charisma Men, fleeing ordinary life, thinking that teaching English in a foreign country will be a breeze and that success will be had without any effort. But as the days turn into months, Jack begins to question himself about the meaning of success. He had rushed into this job only because he did not respect his brother-in-law who gave him a job at his company only because Jack's sister insisted upon it. Jack who has never left his home country of Canada, Jack who has no knowledge of Taiwan and cannot speak Chinese, Jack who is in dire need of growing up! Jack at first is not a very likable character.

But as the story develops, we see Jack begin to gradually change. We see him overcoming his failures. We see his desire to do things better. Suddenly he wants not only to be a better teacher but to be a better person. We see him overcoming many of his insecurities, and we may even begin to like Jack and root for him.

This story is written by a man who also left Canada and went to Taiwan to teach English for a year. He found himself living in that country for the next nine. I am sure the author has incorporated many of his own experiences into the life of Jack and his descriptions of Taiwan and of the classes make you feel as if you are there as well. As to the title of the book itself? A reference to scars achieved from having an accident on a scooter in the notoriously dangerous traffic. This novel is entertaining as well as educational for any of those readers who might considering teaching English in Asia. ~by Ernie Hoyt

Available at ThingsAsian Books