Reading the Room by Paul Yamazaki (Ode Books)

There are only a few legendary bookstores in the world--Foyles of London, Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and San Francisco’s City Lights, Booksellers and Publishers. Foyles is famous for having thirty miles of books, Shakespeare and Company for being a magnet for 20th Century literary giants--Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein. City Lights was co-founded by one of the most famous Beat poets, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and then became well-known for publishing Allan Ginsberg’s Howl, when nobody else dared to put it into print.

Its luster has been quietly enhanced over the past fifty years by a man who is famous only to writers, publishers, and other booksellers. Paul Yamazaki has shaped and sharpened the collection of books that fill the shelves at City Light since 1970, only now being revealed in a book of his own. Appropriately, this is a series of conversations with other booksellers, in a book that has been published by another bookstore, Chicago’s Seminary Co-op.

Yamazaki came to San Francisco in 1967, walking the streets of Haight-Ashbury in a pair of wing-tip shoes, dressed in a London Fog jacket and brown slacks. He arrived to go to college at his parents’ insistence and the college he chose was a hotbed of dissent, San Francisco State. Not an academically-minded student and admittedly “more conservative than my parents,” this former high school football player immersed himself in the politics of the time, becoming a member of the Asian American Political Alliance. Thrown in jail for “inciting a riot,” a young poet who worked at City Lights convinced Ferlinghetti to get Yamazaki an early prison release by hiring him to work at the bookstore. He’s been there ever since.

“Yamazaki, you work in a bookstore--this bookstore?” his high school English teacher demanded when he encountered his former “memorably bad” student in the aisles of City Lights. Yamazaki doesn’t say what his job was by that time but he went from packing boxes of books to selecting the 30,000 titles that are placed on the bookstore’s shelves. He was instrumental in the decision to go from a store that sold only paperbacks to one that included new release hardcovers, a decision that saved the store from closing its doors forever. It’s now celebrating its 70th anniversary.

“We average 1.3 copies per title,” Yamazaki says, on shelves so tightly packed that booksellers have to move a small library in order to make room for a new volume. And shelving is not a casual activity--Yamazaki wants the shelves to create “a shimmering conversation between the books. When they’re placed side by side, they talk to one another.” 

His goal is to fill the store with books that offer “possibility and resistance,” and the joy that comes with “happiness through knowledge.” “We’ve never been looking for comfort,” he says, “Curiosity is a fundamental tool of a bookseller.” 

“At a great store, you can look through twelve well-selected serendipitous linear inches to find a universe.” In City Lights, a bookstore that’s on the site of a former church and a topless barber shop, Paul Yamazaki has shaped a multitude of challenging, joyful universes. ~Janet Brown

Strange Foods: Bush Meat, Bats, and Butterflies by Jerry Hopkins, photographs by Michael Freeman (Tuttle)

What we think is delicious and what we recoil from as disgusting is determined by our geography, history, and sheer good luck. Nothing points that out like one of the first photographs in the opening pages of Strange Foods. If you think the image of a baby calf on a plate, still in fetal form, is revolting, ask yourself how is that more quelling than a dish made with veal? Would you rather eat a calf that isn’t yet alive or one that’s knocked on the head when it’s a living, breathing, cute little baby? What’s the difference?

That question is posed again and again throughout this provocative book and Jerry Hopkins is the right man to pose it. When his youngest child was born at home, Hopkins refrigerated the expelled placenta, later turning it into a paté for guests at the christening party. Nobody died.

“No one is sure what the first humans ate,” Hopkins says, but it’s a sure thing that they wouldn’t have turned down the dish made of little pink baby mole rats that’s eaten in modern India. Probably the French during the Franco-Prussian War’s Siege of Paris wouldn’t have spurned that either back in 1871, when people flocked to stalls that sold dog and cat meat. Starvation breeds exotic tastes.

Horse meat has been a staple throughout human history, with U.S entrepreneurs in our present day buying wild horses to slaughter and sending their meat to Europe and Japan. Thirty years ago, Seattle’s famous Pike Place Market had a stall selling steaks, roasts, and ground meat that came from mustangs in Montana.

Cows or horses? Both are livestock but only one is commonly raised for food. However in Mexico, when Columbus first showed up, the only domestic livestock raised for human consumption were turkeys and dogs. In the northeast of Thailand, in a distant province where life is rough, dog meat is a staple and, Hopkins reports, in the civilized modern city of Guangzhou dogs and cats wait to be bought, killed, and butchered on the spot—along with deer, pigeons, rabbits, and guinea pigs—”a take-away zoo.”

When mad cow disease emerged in Europe, suddenly kangaroo, ostrich, and zebra appeared on supermarket meat counters as “exotic meat.” Beefalo was a popular meat during a period of soaring U.S beef prices and in Alaska, consumers happily chow down on reindeer sausage, swallowing Rudolph and his colleagues without a qualm. Still, the thought of elephant meat on the menus of African restaurants makes many a Westerner turn pallid.

In the 1970s, muktuk was sold as a snack at an Alaskan state fair. Bits of the skin and blubber from a beluga whale, it was chewy and flavorless, clearly an acquired taste and to the Inuit of Alaska, almost sacramental.

The Arctic offers little in the way of food and whale hunting is still one of the chief means of subsistence. This isn’t necessarily true of Japan, a highly developed country that consumes large amounts of whale meat. It’s indubitably more healthy than more conventional options. “Richer in protein, whale meat has fewer calories than beef or pork, and it is substantially lower in cholesterol.” Whales are rapidly increasing in number around the world, Hopkins reports, and opposition to whaling is decreasing. Who knows? If we can order shark steak in fine dining establishments, will whale be on the menu soon?

Hopkins made his home in Thailand where he lived until his death in 2018. Michael Freeman has spent most of his career in Southeast Asia. The two of them have encountered—and eaten— insects, silk worm larvae, bats, scorpions, and partially-formed chicken embryos still in the shell. They are proponents of a truth that prevails in their book: Anything can be delicious if it meets a kitchen with a clever cook. To back this up, recipes appear in almost every chapter to challenge the squeamish and entice gastronomic adventurers. Rootworm Beetle Dip, anyone? (I don’t know about you, but I’d rather eat that than the classic Scottish meal made from sheep’s stomach and lungs—haggis? No, thanks!)—Janet Brown

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips (Knopf)

When two little girls disappear after playing on a deserted stretch of beach one summer’s day, the small city of Zavoyko on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula is besieged with tinges of fear. Children are confined to their homes while young women are flooded with memories of an older girl who vanished years before and was never seen again. A woman who claims she saw the two children entering a black car driven by a man on the afternoon of their disappearance has no details that could help the local police in the search for the girls and her story is disregarded. Eleven months later the mother of the two missing children meets the mother of the lost teenager and is given a clue that might let her know what became of all three girls.

A novel with the basic plot of a conventional mystery becomes far more than that. Zavoyko is a divided community, with white residents, the “real Russians,” on one side and indigenous people, grouped together as “natives,” on the other. And yet the city is small enough that the lives within it intertwine and intermingle when they are brought together by tragedies. When Marina, the mother of the little girls, finally meets Alla, the mother of the teenager, their racial differences are transcended by their shared pain.

In chapters that function almost as linked short stories, Julia Phillips gives voice to eleven different women, white and native, who live in Zavoyko. All of them are displaced.

The indigenous women have lost their identities, with five separate tribes stripped of their cultures by the former Soviet Union who homogenized then as a monolithic group. Living far from the communities that had nurtured them, they’ve come to Zavoyko for an education and for jobs. When the little girls go missing, they watch the search that takes place, angered that the vanished teenager was ignored and quickly forgotten. The little girls are Russian, the teenager is indigenous, and the different reactions to the two disappearances point out the supremacy of one group over the other. This is “a deep common knowledge, an ache that was native.”

The Russians came to Zavoya when the Kamchatka Peninsula was an integral part of the Soviet Union’s military system, “so tightly defended that even other Russians needed government permission to enter.” Military funding made this outpost a comfortable place to live but when the Soviet rule disintegrated, “Kamchatka went down with it.” Now they live in a region surrounded on three sides by water, linked to the mainland only by roads made from dirt and ice, a spot where 32 degrees is considered warm.

The division is sharply revealed when Alla, one of the Even tribe, confronts the Russian, Marina, about the police search for the two little girls while her daughter was given scant attention. “You must have paid them, I think…They didn’t listen to me.” Yet when Marina is given a shred of information that may conclude her search, it’s given to her by a man who is Even.

There are no easy answers to the questions that pervade Disappearing Earth. There is no conclusively happy ending. But Phillips, in her debut novel, has depicted a haunting and compelling narrative of bleakness, beauty, and the powerful strength that comes from telling a story.~Janet Brown

Ocean’s Godori by Elaine U. Cho (Hillman Grad Books)

Ocean Yoon ought to be on the fast track to stardom. She can outrun any other space pilot in the solar system, she’s a graduate of the world’s best flight program, and she’s Korean. 

Korea rules the solar system with its space agency, the Alliance, and Seoul is a glittering metropolis filled with galactic hotshots. Ocean would be one of them except for two fatal obstacles. She was sent to a boarding school on Neptune where she grew up without the cultural influences that would make her truly Korean and she’s developed a mind of her own that doesn’t submit well to authority. Early in her space career she made a decision that’s branded her as a liability on any spaceship. Nobody wants the woman with the grisly nickname, Headshot, who never misses her target—except for a captain with a shaky code of ethics and a ship that needs Ocean’s unmatched speed and skill.

Captain Song pretends that she “could put this ship on auto-pilot and it would do the job,” but when things get rough, she turns to the woman whom she tries to ignore. She has to rely on Ocean, who has gained the respect of the crew in a way that Song has not. Even the newest recruit, a man from a planet where the inhabitants learn to become Masters of the Death Arts, is fascinated by Ocean from the moment he joins the crew. 

When Ocean’s best friend Teo, the son of a man who has made his fortune by devastating the environments of other planets, shows up in an escape pod, wounded and unconscious, mutiny begins to simmer beneath the surface of Song’s crew. It bubbles over when the most notorious raider in space comes aboard and places a wedge between Song and her crew. Phoenix wants Teo’s money and Ocean’s skills and he’s smart enough to exploit the situation to get what he wants.

Elaine U. Cho is adept at creating a multifaceted plot that takes a new twist on every page but her ability to bring life to her characters through smart and snappy dialogue is what powers this novel into new territory. Ocean’s Godori soars far beyond conventional science fiction. Its roots are in the Saturday morning serials that once made radio stations popular, when dialogue and cliffhangers ruled the airwaves. Cho has resurrected that form and made it her own, ending her debut novel with a teasing conversation that sets the stage for the next episode.

“A thief, a hacker, an accountant, and now a pilot. My ultimate party is almost complete.” Because Cho has provided a multitude of characters who almost threaten to topple Ocean’s Godori, Phoenix has quite a few candidates who might complete his party. The question is will Cho be able to sustain this wild pace and devious plot in a follow-up novel? What she’s done in this one sets a high bar. She’s written a space fantasy that will ensnare even those readers who despise science fiction.~Janet Brown

The Moon Represents My Heart by Pim Wangtechawat (Blackstone Publishing)

Imagine being born into a family of time travelers and having that gift become yours when you’re still a child. Tommy and Eva are lucky. Unlike their parents, they aren’t made aware of this talent alone, with parents who have no idea that this ability exists outside of storybooks. Joshua and Lily had learned to use their unusual travel skills in secret, until they met each other and slowly divulged their shared truth. When they discover their own children can whisk themselves back in time, they’re delighted and eager to make this a family affair.

Each of them have their own territories. Joshua returns to his childhood home in the Kowloon Walled City. Lily finds herself in England while Tommy is limited to London before 1950. Eva is pulled into the lives of her distant relatives, both dead and living. All of them would agree that time travel carries “a loss waiting to happen.” When that loss comes, their family dissolves forever, leaving Tommy and Eva to carry the weight of their gift alone and unguided.

A scientist and a mathematician, Joshua is reluctant to accept the limitations of time travel that constrain him and his family. Although they can explore the 20th Century from its very beginning, a boundary line separates them from other eras. When he and Lily have fleeting moments in 1899, he embarks upon The Experiment that will fully take them into the 19th Century.

Tommy and Eva wait for their parents on the day of The Experiment, reassuring themselves that an hour’s delay is nothing to fret over. When days have passed and they are still alone, they call Lily’s mother.

Their grandmother never acknowledges the probable death of her daughter and son-in-law, just as she has never welcomed the idea of time travel. To her the vanished parents are simply “gone” and the reason for this is one that she refuses to think about. She forbids her grandchildren to follow the example set by Lily and Joshua and when they do, it becomes a clandestine and shameful activity.

Eva uses her gifts to find a home with the relatives she meets on her secretive excursions into time. Tommy learns his talent carries a way to break hearts, especially his own. Steeped in darkness, he loses his ability to love.

Pim Wangtechawat chose her cumbersome title from the name of a song once made famous by a Hong Kong singer, Teresa Teng. This choice has little to do with her novel, other than a fleeting cameo appearance in the final chapter. Sadly, its amorphous quality is reflected in Wangtechawat’s writing. She frequently lapses into pages of sentences she’s broken into spacing that’s usually found only in poetry. However any poetic touches found here are based in cliches: “soft, golden light,” “a maze of twinkling lights,” “a cold, hardened look in her eyes.”

The Moon Represents My Heart is based on a promising idea that quickly becomes scattered and shapeless. It’s slated to become a series on Netflix, where visual details will supplant the hackneyed images and what seems vague may be sharpened into an intriguing mystery. For now, its story has dissolved as completely as the vanished parents, making it as irksome to read as it is to care about.~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 learn 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 that, right up until the moment 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, along with 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 her son is a byproduct of her stunning ambition and determination, their bond only becomes close after Ian 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

Under the Naga Tail by Mae Bunseng Taing, with James Taing (Greenleaf Book Group Press)

Mae is eleven when Apollo 11 puts men on the moon, a feat that captures his imagination and makes him believe he’s living in a new era when anything is possible—even for a boy living in rural Cambodia. But as he nears the end of his adolescence, another era closes in upon him, his family,  and his country, one that begins with Year Zero.

Cambodia has been in turmoil for several years, with “freedom fighters” battling the puppet government of the U.S.-backed Lon Nol. Popular opinion sides with the insurgents because they purportedly will restore King Sihanouk to his throne. Mae’s father is a firm believer in this theory, even when a woman emerges from the jungle, fleeing in terror for the nearby Thai border. 

“Monsters…barbaric monsters…that’s what they are,” she tells Mae’s family as she recounts the atrocities committed by the rebel forces, “You must leave.” But Mae’s father is positive that “the freedom fighters were defending the honor of the king.” He had already fled one country, leaving China to find peace and prosperity in Cambodia, and he is certain it’s unnecessary to do this again. He and his eight children are staying put, even though it’s a short journey from their home to Thailand.

Within the first twenty pages of Under the Naga Tail, his decision becomes engulfed in horror that turns impossibly and dreadfully more intense with every passing chapter. Although the rebel forces prevail and are greeted with cheers and hope, they immediately close the border and kill three “Thai thieves” in a public execution that the entire community is forced to watch. Then they evacuate the area, claiming it’s a temporary measure to avoid American bombs. Mae and his family would never live in their former home again and many more wouldn’t survive to reclaim what once belonged to them.

The savagery that engulfs Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 is unmitigated by liberating troops from Vietnam who have no room for compassion. Across the border, where Mae and his family seek the safety of Thailand after barely surviving four years of starvation and forced labor, there’s no sanctuary waiting for them. According to C.I.A. reports, forty-two thousand Cambodians, Mae and his family among them, were removed from refugee camps by Thai troops and were taken to the sacred mountain of Preah Vihear. From there they were forced to climb down the other side of the mountain, back into Cambodia. Ten thousand of them were never seen again.

Scant mercy is given to the Cambodians who are displaced and subjected in the years between 1975 and 1979—not offered by the liberators nor by the country that could shelter them. The atrocities of the Pol Pot Time and the cruelties of its aftermath are revealed in excruciating detail, disclosed as Mae and his family live them. His account is appalling and soul-wrenching and guaranteed to disturb your dreams.

The miracle of his survival, with almost all of his family, only occurred because of strength and courage that goes beyond all human limits. If this book is painfully difficult to read, only imagine the agony that came as a son wrote the words his father used as he recalled and resurrected a hell on earth for the world to see and remember. Under the Naga Tail shows the bare bones of history that are all too often veiled in statistics and sanitized by bureaucratic reports. It turns readers into witnesses who just might help to change present-day crimes against humanity.~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. This 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 meet the “queer, impassive little dolls” who sing in restaurants while 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 tarnished by his 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 Texan who only made it through high school. In a magnanimous description he says 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, while 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, in her thirties, she sailed to visit her sister in India. From there she had gone to Ceylon, Fiji, New Zealand, and Japan before she 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 falls in love with Hong Kong’s “steep streets of stairs” that lead 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 goes up in flames that night when Christmas festivities are interrupted by an act of arson that threatens to consume the city. Perched above the conflagration in a Mid-Level home, Gordon-Cumming watches the fire as it destroys Chinatown and advances upon the affluent homes of Hong Kong’s expatriates. Ten acres of the city are 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” has resumed and by January 9th a short voyage takes Gordon-Cumming to Canton. There she’s met by a “resplendent palanquin” that’s fit for a mandarin but waits to take her to her hostess on the Western enclave of Shamian Island. Delighted by the English social life that hold 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 submerges 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. Vessels 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 crafts 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 ends her life of travel. A year after her time in Canton, she remains aboard a ship that evacuates its passengers when it runs aground. Refusing to leave the watercolors she has painted on the voyage, she stays with the captain until the two of them are 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 U.S. 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 by giving his children to China under extreme secrecy, an act that would go against U.S. 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. This task 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 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 has learned early in life that to gain the attention she wanted, she needs to be attentive as well as beguiling. By the time she goes to China, she’s absorbed a rudimentary political understanding that she brings to bear in her 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 step away from 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 entire 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

Here After by Amy Lin (Zibby Books)

When her husband goes off on a morning run, Amy Lin tells him, “Don’t go too hard. Love you.” Those are the last words she will ever say to him. An hour or so later, Kurtis Nakayama’s body is found on a trail, dead before he hit the ground. A prolonged autopsy finds no reason for his death.

Kurtis is 32. Amy is 31. They’ve been married for less than two years. They’ve been in love for seven. With his death, Amy “falls out of time.” Ten days afterward, she’s diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis with clots in one leg, her abdomen, and a lung. If she dies, she wonders, will Kurtis be waiting for her? She lives to cremate her husband and begins to wrestle with the longing to die herself.

When they first met, Amy told Kurtis she was a substitute teacher. He contradicted her after he found a blog she had kept in the past. “Why did you say that? You’re a writer.”

Writing emerges again as she enters a life without Kurtis. With scalding honesty she narrates the account of what it is to be a widow when the man with whom she planned a future is dead. Grief, she discovers, is an unexplored emotion in modern Western culture. Nobody wants to hear about it and even therapists are poorly equipped to deal with it. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, has an entry for “excessive grief disorder,” when mourning the death of someone close goes on beyond twelve months.

Amy is told otherwise by a counselor. Grief sharpens after the first year and then sometimes again around the third through fifth years. “Grief is a long journey, “ the counselor says and Amy thinks “I can’t do this for five years.”

“How are you doing, friends ask, “I can’t imagine what you’re going through. Take it a day at a time. Hey, doing well?” As time goes on, they tell Amy “It’s difficult to hear. It’s too heavy. It makes me too sad. I need a break.” One psychotherapist persistently refers to Kurtis’s death as “a stressful event.” Another asks “Do you feel as if you’ve been hit by a train?” “No,” Amy says, “You hear a train coming.”

For the first time in their lives together, Amy asks her father how long it was before he finally felt “space from his grief” when in his early twenties, he faced the death of his father. “Years,” he says, and then after a moment, “maybe never.” 

The widely accepted template of Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief is one Amy doesn’t fit within. She discovers that it was never intended for mourning. It was developed after studying the behavior of terminally ill patients as they faced their own deaths. There is no template for young widows, only statistics. They face the “widowhood effect,” with a heightened risk of suicide in the year after their husbands have died. They are 22% more likely than married women to die “of other causes…that may seem random but are, in fact, not.”

Amy heard the screams of Kurtis’s parents when she told them he was dead. She stays alive because she knows her death would cause her parents that same agony. When she’s given a residency at Yaddo, she goes because long before she promised Kurtis she would take him; she would show him “every single thing.” She transforms her anguish into art and leaves us all with an unyielding question.

“How can grief be so universal and yet still be so widely misunderstood?”~Janet Brown

Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes by Chantha Nguon, with Kim Green (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)

Even when she was very small, Chantha Nguon knew the difference between noodles. Instant noodles came in packages and “tasted careless.” Kuy teav noodles, made from wheat flour mixed with eggs, were sold in the Battambang market every day, available to anyone who had the money to buy them. But best of all were her mother’s noodles, hand-rolled into perfect cylinders that took hours to prepare. Slow noodles, she learned as a little girl, are the best and will provide her with an enduring “philosophy for life.” Care and practice, with no shortcuts, make daily living rich and flavorful.

A child with a “puppy nose for food,” Chantha knows what happiness smells like: “cloves, cracked pepper, and pate de foie.” Her mother was a beauty who knew looks weren’t enough. She augmented the gift of her appearance with extravagant meals that took lots of money and time to prepare. Her cooking was a kind of magical theatre production that entranced her little daughter and the memories of that food would shape Chantha’s future.

Cambodia swiftly transforms from “a little girl’s heaven” into a place of turmoil and tragedy. The U.S.-backed government headed by Lon Nol turns against anyone with Vietnamese blood and Chantha’s mother is Vietnamese. She sends her children to Saigon to live in the safety of relatives there. But in that portion of Southeast Asia there is no safety. Cambodia becomes locked in the horror of “Pol Pot time” and Saigon becomes Ho Chi Minh City.

Poverty sweeps over both countries in terrible ways. Chantha’s mother escapes from Cambodia to be with her children, and then witnesses the deaths of two of them. Chantha is the only child to stay alive—and then her mother dies.

Chantha has never learned how to be frugal. At one point in her life when her mother made a living in Vietnam as a seamstress, wooden clogs in different colors became the girl’s obsession and she used her pocket money to buy forty or fifty pairs. “I should use those as firewood,” her mother teased her. Later, alone after her mother’s death, Chantha burns them all, one by one, as fuel for cooking rice.

As she struggles to stay alive, a fortune teller predicts she will become even more poverty-stricken in the future but “sewing and cooking will save you….You will take care of yourself.”

The story of her survival and her return to Cambodia with the man whom she will marry is an adventure that tears at the heart, but this isn’t the driving force of Slow Noodles. The theme that prevails is how a country was deprived of its history, with its future jeopardized by Pol Pot’s Communist Party of Kampuchea. Trying to blot out over a thousand years of culture, this government erased “education, medicine, cinema, books, money, cars and religion” by killing anyone “whose job it was to plan for tomorrow: doctors, engineers, teachers, scientists.” “Estimates range from 1.6 to 1 million dead, from one-fifth to more than a quarter of the population.” What was left in the aftermath was “a country with no idea of tomorrow.”

Slow Noodles is a metaphor as well as a cherished culinary memory. Time, patience, persistence, and care are essential for making this dish and for the recovery of a traumatized nation. Chantha Nguon shows how this is possible to accomplish in a book that celebrates the importance of food in rebuilding a culture and revitalizing a country, while generously offering traditional Khmer recipes to replicate in any kitchen.~Janet Brown

Black Ghosts: A Journey into the Lives of Africans in China by Noo Saro-Wiwa (Canongate)

One of the more interesting and impenetrable parts of Hong Kong and beyond are the enclaves of African men who show up and clearly know their way around. In Kowloon’s Chungking Mansions, some are asylum seekers and many more are undocumented, there for “business.” Gordon Mathews, anthropology professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and author of Ghetto at the Center of the World (Asia by the Book, June 2012) and Globalization from Below, has taught English classes in Chungking Mansions for years and has gained the confidence of many African residents of that community. Everyone else receives a polite greeting in passing, at best.

Mathews writes about the community of Africans who live in Guangzhou and when Noo Saro-Wiwa learns about them, she goes to that city in search of them. Nigerian by birth and brought up in England, she holds a British passport and has studied at both King’s College, London and Columbia University. She has a unique position of Western privilege and an African birthright which leads her to feel confident that she will be able to discover how Africans live in the south of China.

She’s mistaken. Her attempts to penetrate a male world of men who live by their wits and without documentation are met with the usual reply of “We’re here to do business.” A few take her to dinner and to nightclubs but although she’s introduced to their friends, she still hits a wall when asking about their lives in China.

Guangzhou has neighborhoods that are largely occupied by men from Africa and Saro-Wiwa spends most of her time within these areas. She makes contact with a Nigerian fabric merchant who comes to Guangzhou for a month at a time several times a year. “I jealous these people,” he tells her with a “clenched admiration,” “What this country has and we do not have in our country is quite enormous…Enormous wealth. The U.S. don’t even have it.”

This wealth doesn’t trickle down to the area known as “Chocolate City,” a place dominated by a massive market that is a “bazaar of garishness.” There Africans and Chinese engage in a dance of commerce that is plagued by cross-cultural misunderstandings, acrimony, and racism. Saro-Wiwa encounters the racism quickly. Although she is clearly a visitor and a woman of means, vendors turn her away when she asks for a discount. 

Despite the Chinese aversion to dark skin, there are a number of Guangzhou women who have married and started families with African men. This has created a kind of settled community, with mixed-race children and a tentative form of security. Still, she’s told, that although “no sane person will stay in Nigeria,” for these men whose Chinese wives and half-Chinese children allow them permanent residency status, “Every day you are being reminded of where you come from. I don’t belong here.”

Although eventually Saro-Wiwa discovers the businesses that keep the African afloat, including drug-dealing, she’s forced to flesh out her book with stories of her travels in other parts of China and facts garnered from her academic research. A seasoned travel writer who works for Conde Nast Traveler, she makes her solitary explorations enticing. She falls in love with Wuhan only months before covid shuts that city down and gives a splendid account of the northern town, Pingyao, whose antiquities escaped the depredations of the Cultural Revolution. She ends up taking refuge in the more hospitable area of Hong Kong where her research gains an increasingly intimate texture. Even so, Black Ghosts ends with the knowledge that her “journey into the lives of Africans in China” doesn’t live up to its subtitle. Saro-Wiwa hasn’t even illuminated the lives of Africans in Guangzhou.~Janet Brown

The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock's Lost Queen by Gregory Cahill and Kat Baumann (Life Drawn by Humanoids)

As a person who’s been an enthusiastic reader for 71 years, it came as a shock when I recently discovered there were reading skills I’ve yet to acquire. I wasn’t allowed to read comic books when I was a child which means I’ve struggled with graphic novels as a (very) mature adult. Giving equal attention to the words and the pictures in each frame wasn’t easy for me and when I finally learned to do it, I felt quite proud.

Then I bought a copy of The Golden Voice, a biography of the Cambodian singer Ros Serey Sothea, that is written as a graphic narrative. The art is cinematic and the words, readers are told at the outset, are written in three different languages: Romanized Khmer, English, and French, along with a healthy smattering of military acronyms. But here’s what most intrigued me, and almost defeated me—this book comes with a playlist and a QR code that allows 47 songs to be played as the book is being read.

I’m a tremendous fan of the Khmer music stars of the 60s and 70s, especially Ros Serey Sothea and Sin Sisamouth, both of whom died during Pol Pot’s reign of terror. So I happily scanned the QR code and read the accompanying directions. The songs were chosen to complement the narrative and they were meant to be played in order. However there was a little glitch. Icons with the corresponding numbers of each song appeared in the frames, telling readers when to hit play and when to hit stop.

Once I was involved in the life of a girl who rose out of the rice fields in Battambang to become a star renowned and loved throughout the Kingdom of Cambodia, I often overlooked the tiny numbered icons that gave the appropriate background music. They are very small and easy to miss. I ended up backtracking to hit play--but since I’m a rapid reader, I was told to stop much too soon and so I heard only a few bars of each song. By the time I turned the final page, I had a mild headache and felt as if I’d just picked up a raging case of dyslexia.

Probably the ideal way to read this stunning piece of graphic art is to play the 47 songs without stopping—at least for readers like me who are unused to the magic of QR codes and instructions embedded in the text. After I approached the book that way, I wasn’t only immersed in the tragic life of a gifted singer, I felt as if I’d been transported to the radio stations, recording studios, nightclubs, and the American Embassy in Phnom Penh during the war. The art is that detailed, showing not just the city but the rapidly changing facial expressions of the characters that do much to tell the story. Reading The Golden Voice is like watching an animated film.

First published in Cambodia, this book gives a detailed look at the turbulent and tragic years that led up to the Khmer Rouge’s takeover of the country. Gregory Cahill met and interviewed surviving members of Ros Serey Sothea’s and Sin Sisamouth’s families. Unfortunately these relatives were unable to give a complete picture of events that took place after the Khmer Rouge came to power so Cahill cautions readers that not everything he’s written is factual. The tragic end of Ros Serey Sothea’s life may not have happened as he’s shown it in this biography. 

Still, through his text and Kat Baumann’s art, along with the songs they’ve provided, the life of this beautiful woman who died when she was only thirty, is movingly and carefully told.~Janet Brown

Where Rivers Part by Kao Kalia Yang (Simon & Schuster)

Kao Kalia Yang comes from a line of beautiful women who gave birth to equally beautiful daughters. All of them had a special closeness to their mothers and in this lovely history, Yang pays tribute to three generations of these strong and stunning Hmong women.

Beginning with her great-grandmother who was “unexpectedly beautiful…smart and able, though rumored to be promiscuous,” and moving on to the Bad Luck Woman, the grandmother whom Yang never knew except through the stories of her own mother, she then unfolds the story of Tswb, “Chew,” whose own bad luck is counteracted by her quick and determined mind, and who gives birth to daughters whose luck is shaped by the life their mother has made possible.

Chew’s beauty gives her an indulged childhood that ends with the death of her father and the war that takes her away from the village of fruit trees in blossom, where two rivers meet and diverge. In the midst of upheaval and death, Chew’s mother leads her children in a perilous and grueling flight through Laos’ jungles. 

This is where Chew first sees the man for whom she will leave her mother. Without hesitation, she marries Npis, “Bee,” a “song poet” whose lack of ambition is counterbalanced by his deep and unflagging love. He pulls her, their infant daughter, and his own mother across the Mekong River into Thailand, and stands on the opposite bank with his skin torn into “pale ribbons of flesh,” shredded by the tubes of bamboo and the ropes that he clutched to bring his family to safety. 

But Bee had grown up in poverty. He lacked Chew’s background of comfort and education that drives her to seize all opportunities for a better life. After spending years of squalor in a refugee camp, she persuades him to seek repatriation in another country and two years later, Bee, Chew, and their two children are on a plane that will take them to Minnesota. 

In America, they find they “have been tossed through time.” Their daughters swiftly become fluent in English. Chew struggles through two years of night classes to attain a high school diploma while Bee fumes that she’s wasting her time. She “should have just taken the GED test,” as he had. Now he studies at a community college to get a machine operating certificate. They all, parents and daughters, sit at the kitchen table every night, doing their homework.

 Chew is constantly pregnant and her children are predominately daughters. She’s determined to break the cycle of “bad luck women” and through her efforts and example, her daughters go to Stanford, Columbia, Carleton College, the University of Minnesota. They live outside of what their mother had known when she “existed in a picture of need.”

Where Rivers Part is the third book in Yang’s trilogy that began with The Latehomecomer (Asia by the Book, April 2008) and The Song Poet (Asia by the Book, March 2021) . Each tells a different segment of Yang’s family history--her own memories of life in the refugee camp with her shaman grandmother and the story of Bee’s life as a child who had never known his father and who struggled to learn how to be a father himself after he and Chew were married. But the most tender and poetic of these three family histories is Yang’s story of her mother. 

The story of a girl who grew up in a gentle home, who loved to learn, who fell in love at first sight with a stranger and married him when she was still a child, who gave birth to fourteen children and lost half of them before they left her body, who returned to Laos after her seven surviving children were grown and realized her own mother waited there, ready to welcome her home after she died, is told in words that give Chew’s life the luster of fiction and the blessings of truth.~Janet Brown

Rental Person Who Does Nothing by Shoji Morimoto, translated by Don Knotting (Hanover Square Press)

How does a person make a living when their only ambition is to do nothing? For Shoji Morimoto, the solution is to do nothing as an occupation. Through Twitter, he makes it known that he is available for any situation where another person is needed, just so long as he is required to do nothing. He began this pursuit in 2018 and has done nothing for other people over 4000 times since then. For this, he charges only his travel expenses, asking that any food or drink required during the appointment be covered by the client. Later he puts the client’s request and a summary of his response to it on Twitter, which is his only form of advertising. At the time this book was written, he received three requests a day for his service. Within ten months of launching this enterprise, his Twitter followers went from 300 to 100,000. Apparently he has found a Japanese need and is quite busily filling it.

Who asks for a person who will do nothing? Artists of all kinds, writers, manga illustrators, musicians, ask Morimoto to sit with them, silently, while they create. A marathon runner wants him to stand at the finish line, waiting for the entrant to complete the race. Others ask that he attend court proceedings as an onlooker, meet them at an airport, or wave them off as they leave on a train. One endearing request is that he join another man to have an ice cream soda, something the client is too embarrassed to do on his own. Another job results in a spectacular hangover when Morimoto is asked to sit in a park while the client drinks a can of chu-hai (a shochu highball). “Summer, nighttime, a park, alcohol…I got pretty drunk,” he confesses in a tweet.

Others have more complex requests. One woman wants to talk about her girlfriend, whom she hasn’t revealed to her family or friends. A patient in a hospital asks for a visit in the suicide risk intensive care unit she’s been placed in. A man divulges at the end of his time period that he used to be a member of the Aum Shinrikyo cult. Another wants Morimoto to spend a day with him in his home because he’s never shared it with another person. The client confesses when the day is over that he’s been released from prison where he served a sentence for murder.

This is an occupation that requires a lack of personality, evaluation, advice, or judgment. Morimoto is careful to keep his responses neutral, sticking with “Uh-huh” and “I see.” His role, as he sees it, is to fall between “friend” and “stranger” during his times with a client. He serves as a sort of quasi-friend to the person who’s engaged his services. Between the two of them there’s no emotional history and no demands of reciprocity, which is why one woman asks him to have dinner with her at a very expensive restaurant. If she had asked a friend, that person would feel obligated to do the same for her.

Because Morimoto approaches his work as a blank slate that the client fills as they wish, the obvious question is will he eventually be replaced by a robot? Not in Japan, he says, where people suffer from “AI fatigue” and yearn for human contact, even for something as simple as receiving a reminder message. 

Since he charges nothing, how does he survive? From savings garnered from his brief foray into financial trading is what he claims, although a Reuters article quotes him as saying that when he first began as Rental Person, he charged 10,000 yen (about $71) per rental.

Although he initially depended heavily upon Twitter for exposure, Morimoto has been featured in manga, has inspired a TV series, and, according to the author information that appears on the final page, he’s written other books. Not too shabby for a man who claims he does nothing.~Janet Brown

The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai (G.P. Putnam's Sons, release date February 13, 2024)

Tucked away on a street near Kyoto’s Higashi Honganji Temple lies a hidden restaurant. No sign directs customers to it. A one-line advertisement in Gourmet Monthly gives no contact information, only two names: The Kamogawa Diner and The Kamogawa Detective Agency. For those who manage to find this place, they discover that it has no menu but the owner serves whatever food he has cooked for that day on the finest of lacquerware and Baccarat crystal plates. Clearly this is no ordinary diner.

Although the food is made from the best ingredients, what draws customers to search for this place is the  detective agency. Each one of them is haunted by a dish they had in the past, with flavors they’ve been unable to replicate or find in any other restaurant and with memories they hope to relive if they can only find the exact replica, faithful in every detail. 

This is what the Kamogawa Detective Agency promises its clients. After learning every piece of information that is remembered about where and when they had this food and any detail they recall about its taste and presentation, the owner scours Japan for it, tracking down every minute clue that has been given to him. If he succeeds, he charges nothing but what the client wants to give.

The stories told by the six customers in this book are charming and resonant. One man wants a simple meal that his dead wife used to make for him. A woman hopes to eat a dish she once left unfinished because her date unexpectedly proposed marriage to her as their meal was put on the table. Another hopes to restore her ex-husband’s vanished memory, stolen by dementia, if she can feed him the food that once only he was able to make. Since everyone in the world has a particular culinary memory that they would love to taste one more time, these people are ones readers can easily take to heart--but they aren’t the core of this novel.

Author Hisashi Kashiwai is a Kyoto dentist with a passion for food and the skills of a forensic kitchen detective. He is aware of every detail that makes a dish extraordinary and he divulges them all. Whether it’s the way water drawn from different regions can change flavors or how pouring tea over a helping of rice can enhance the taste, Kashiwai generously divulges these little secrets. His descriptions of the meals served in the diner or tracked down by an indefatigable expert dominate his book. If you aren’t a devotee of Japanese cuisine, you will be by the time you finish reading about all the dishes Kashiwai describes so well,

None of his choices are haute cuisine. They’re simple dishes that people eat as everyday meals but their ingredients turn them into unique culinary art. Hishashi makes the regional differences in Japanese cooking something to yearn for, along with the use of ingredients that are only available in their particular season. Slivers of taro in mackerel sushi, taro found only in a small village, elevates the flavor as nothing else can and canned meat, cooked cleverly, can rival the finest Kobe beef. 

Kashiwai is also a devoted lover of Kyoto and reveals the magic of his hometown in a few quick sentences. Sprinkled among the luscious descriptions of food are quick glimpses of the gingko trees that turn the city to gold in the fall, the mountains that loom white in the winter, the courtyards filled with spring cherry blossoms, and the mists and shadows that bring mystery to the streets in the rainy season. “There was nowhere like Kyoto to make you really notice the changing of the seasons,” one client observes as he approaches the diner.

Although The Kamogawa Food Detectives is being compared to the series that was launched by Before the Coffee Gets Cold, (Asia by the Book, February 2023), Kashiwai published this two years before the Coffee series began. He’s followed it with The Restaurant of Lost Recipes, a sequel that’s not yet available in the U.S. which gives promise of a series in the offing.

More dishes? More intriguing ingredients? Sign me up for a Kyoto food tour, please, Mr. Kashiwai!~Janet Brown

Songs on Endless Repeat by Anthony Veasna So (HarperCollins)

“I have less in common with mainstream Asians, like Chinese, Japanese, the usual suspects, than say middle-aged Jewish people because…both older Jewish folks and young Cambos have parents who either survived or died in a genocide!”

Here is the voice of Anthony Veasna So, who died when he was 28, just months before his book of short stories, Afterparties, (Asia by the Book, August 2021) was published and acclaimed by everyone from the New Yorker to popsugar.com. This offhand line from one of the characters in the recently published posthumous collection of work by So, Songs on Endless Repeat, echoes with absolute truth. The person who would most appreciate and envy that line would now be one of those “older Jewish folks” if he hadn’t, like So, died from a drug overdose--the comedian Lenny Bruce.  

So himself took the microphone as a stand-up comedian. He also was a scathing cartoonist, an artist who painted enigmatic self portraits. A writer whose fiction was published in the New Yorker and Granta, he signed a two-book deal with HarperCollins when he was in his mid-twenties. At the time of his death, he was immersed in writing that second book, “a first novel draft [that] will definitely push the limits of digestible length.” 

HarperCollins paid $300,000 for Afterparties and for the novel that would follow. Determined to get their money’s worth after So’s death, they scraped together pieces of fiction and nonfiction, tossing it all into the crazy salad that’s become his second—and last—published book. They should never have done this. They looted a grave.

Songs on Endless Repeat is an incoherent mixture of five previously published essays, both in print and online, one lengthy and unpublished piece that delves into reality television, and eight chapters of the first draft that was meant to become his novel, Straight thru Cambotown. 

With a stunning lack of respect for this novel that will never be finished, HarperCollins sprinkled its chapters with haphazard abandon among the pieces of nonfiction, as though the portions of what were intended to begin a novel were random short stories. When read as they’re presented on the page, these chapters become staccato. They jangle and chafe. The characters float in a disembodied context, smoking weed, exchanging obscene wisecracks, presided over by a ghostly figure whose funeral is in the offing. They deserve a better showcase than this scattershot presentation, but the only way they’re going to get it is if their readers ignore the nonfiction that gets in their way and encounter each chapter in order, one after the other, as they would when reading a novel. When this way of reading takes place, then the mourning begins. So’s unpolished rush of fiction, his nascent sketches of characters, his tumbled flood of thoughts, all give promise of a book that would have stunned the literary world.

Vinny, Darren, and Molly, cousins whose childless aunt just died in a fiery car crash, are the dead woman’s prospective heirs. Their aunt was the Counter, a leading figure of her Cambodian community. She headed an improvised bank, with members who contributed to, borrowed from, and earned interest from the communal funds. The Counter was the one who collected and distributed the money, while taking her cut, and it’s rumored that she possessed a fortune. 

An inheritance from her would be welcomed by the cousins. Molly is back home after an unsuccessful stint as an artist in Manhattan, reluctant to sacrifice her dreams to a lucrative career. Vinny is the lead of the Khmai Khmong Rappers, who spits out rhymes in a mixture of Khmer and English in rhythms that hold his memories of the cadence voiced by Cambodian monks. Darren is making his way through the academic morass of graduate student stipends and applications for fellowships, while his thoughts are still influenced by his days as a stand-up comic, terse and cynical, with a vicious bite. 

His is the voice that dominates in these early chapters and his words are the ones that resonate. Describing Cambodian men at family gatherings, he classifies them by what they drink, “Heineken for the humble, Hennessey for the ballers.” A deeper class difference emerges among the men’s children when they reach middle school--are they going to become yellow or brown, choosing academic success or gangster rhythms, “Asian” or “Cambo”? Or will they sink into the mushy definition of Asian American, which Darren derides with his usual scathing insight, “Seriously, we don’t even eat the same grain of rice.”

While Afterparties examined the legacy inherited by the children of those who survived genocide, what’s offered in the opening chapters of So’s unfinished novel is the unwieldy balance between how to succeed in America without jettisoning the cultural roots of the Cambodian community. His final sentences give hints as to how this might have happened for the three cousins, who are forced to immerse themselves in their dead aunt’s livelihood before receiving the inheritance she’s left them. The sketches of Cambotown and its inhabitants give glimpses of a rich and devastating plot that will never come into being, and the sadness of So’s death becomes a matter of literary grief.

But he buries his conclusion among his torrent of words, where it emerges like a polished knife blade flashing in sunlight: “Some things are just lost. So don’t waste your life thinking about it.”~Janet Brown

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan (Simon & Schuster)

“We have your daughter,” are words that would strike terror in any mother’s heart, especially when they’re spoken over the phone by a police officer. Frida Liu is certain that whatever this statement might forebode, she’ll be able to clear it up. She’s a solid citizen, employed by the  Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the possessor of a Bachelor’s degree from Brown and a Master’s from Columbia, who contributes to a 401 (k) and a college savings account for her baby daughter. Although it’s true that she left her eighteen-month-old alone for over two hours, it’s also true that she’s a divorced mother whose brain was fogged from sleeplessness. Awake for the better part of two nights, comforting her daughter while she worked from home, she had gone to her office to pick up papers she needed to complete a job, began to check work emails, and lost track of time.

Negligent? Yes. Criminally negligent? Of course not. Anybody would understand that this is a forgivable offense--even her ex-husband and his new wife have forgiven her lapse of judgment. Frida devotes her life to her child during the 3.5 days she has custody of Harriet. When she considers her own childhood and the stern upbringing given by her immigrant parents, she’s certain Harriet is being given an enviable childhood.

This isn’t the point of view taken by Child Protective Services. A social worker sends her to a psychiatrist who takes one look at her and immediately asks “Is English your first language?” He follows this up later with the condescending response of “Aren’t you a smart cookie.” Frida has become a lesser form of human life in the eyes of authorities and is sent to a year of rehab in a live-in facility with other women who have failed as mothers.

Although offenses range from one mother letting her eight-year-old daughter walk home alone from the nearby library to another who posted a video of her child’s tantrum on social media to those who have physically injured their offspring, the mothers are all lumped together in an indistinguishable mass, with a mantra that they all recite regularly: “I am a bad mother but I am learning to be good.” To help them achieve this goal, each of them is given a robot child of the same age and race as the child that was taken from them. Powered by AI, these replicas of children have the brains and emotions of their human equivalents. They also hold data taken from their “mothers” that’s scrutinized and assessed to see if progress is being made by the women who care for them.

While suffering from the separation from their own children, the women are given rigorous standards to meet as they become parents to robots. Submerging their own speech and personality in the melodic, gentle tones of “motherese,” they face demands that are progressively more difficult, with a new one appearing the minute they’ve mastered the last. But the real progress they make is unmeasured. As they work toward a common goal, the women begin to nurture each other, a form of parenthood that goes under the school’s radar. As the mothers become softer and more tender, they become more vulnerable and this counts against them. They become emotionally involved with their robotic “children,” but are their words and actions being elicited by the robots as a form of entrapment?

Jessamine Chan has written a harrowing novel, based upon a true case in which a mother left her five-year-old child alone in the house for a few hours and lost him forever. Like Frida, this mother was raised by parents from another culture and like Frida, she was diminished by the way she was treated by authorities in the bureaucratic world of social welfare.

Layering and enlarging upon this history, Chan has added elements of dystopian and speculative fiction with dashes of pure horror, creating an Orwellian nightmare that seems perilously close to coming true. Her novel portrays every mother’s worst fear—that she’s not up to the task of keeping a child mentally and physically healthy, well loved, and securely cared for.

“Maybe people should have to work up to children, from plants to pets to babies,” Frida tells herself, “Maybe they should all be given a five-year-old, then four, then three, then two, then one…Why did they have to begin with a baby?” This question echoes throughout Chan’s novel as Frida painfully makes her way through the School for Good Mothers.~Janet Brown

Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova (Graywolf Press)

Borders are mysterious and often troublesome divisions that shift according to political whims and military actions. Only continents, surrounded by oceans,  seem to have borders that resist argument--except for the blurred and amorphous line that separates Europe from Asia. According to the National Geographic Society, this is “an imaginary line, running from the northern Ural Mountains in Russia south to the Caspian and Black Seas.” But to Kapka Kassabova the border between the two continents is found where “Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey converge and diverge…where something like Europe begins and something else ends that is not quite Asia.”

If this definition has a tinge of magic to it, it’s because that’s what Kassabova finds along that hidden border. She grew up within its periphery and it calls to her from her home in Scotland. Alone, she returns to the part of Bulgaria that shaped her early life and begins an exploration that’s both spiritual and geographic. She wants to “see the forbidden places of my childhood…that had been out of bounds for two generations.” What she finds is Stranja, an unimaginable wilderness of forest and mountains, scantily inhabited, filled with legends, impermanence, and death.

The history of this part of the world goes beyond the years of the Iron Curtain, when Russian rule turned the region into a “forested Berlin Wall.” Stranja is where people ignore dangers to make a new life in other countries, running from the Soviet bloc, from the Balkan Wars, from Syria. If they’re lucky, they find guides who will lead them along the treacherous paths of The Road to Freedom--or they may end up in unmarked graves.

Kassabova begins her journey by staying still, in one place, in a village of 200 people where women are rumored to have the power of the evil eye, and firewalkers converge upon a sacred spring in an annual ritual that unites Christians and Muslims, Greeks and Bulgarians. “Beware,” she’s told as she becomes a fixture in the village. Stranja, she learns, is a place that’s hard to enter and is even more difficult to  leave. 

Yet Kassabova lingers there, learning the stories of residents, rediscovering myths, and finding details of lost history that may never have been true. As she delves into the past, the present becomes darker and she realizes “some things are beyond repair.” When she moves on, she’s haunted by the irreparable. “We are not Europe and we are not Asia,” an Eastern Orthodox priest tells her and his words are echoed in other ways by everyone she meets. Every village in Stranja is its own nation-state, created by its unique and repetitive history, and filled with “ a grieving sensation difficult to describe.”

In a village where people are famous for their longevity, Kassabova is accompanied by dogs that look like “shag-pile carpets on long legs” and as she eats a cup of sheep’s yogurt by the side of a road, a bear comes into view and vanishes into the undergrowth. Everyone she meets is given full voice in unforgettable character sketches, from the human-smuggler whom she flees from on a deserted mountain road to the beautiful woman who walked for a week to reach the Greek border and now lives on the Street of Widows, growing the roses that once were her dead husband’s favorite flower. 

Border is a trip back into the past, a foray into the future, a quest for home. In this undefined part of the world, it doesn’t matter which continent claims the region. It’s a place people pass through in search of safety and they have done so throughout recorded time. Because she was born into it, Kapka Kassabova was almost reclaimed by it. What she found there the rest of us can only discover through her words in her strange, illuminating, and seductive book.~Janet Brown