Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien (W.W. Norton & Company)

Within the devastation that swept over Cambodia during the Pol Pot years, names become irrelevant, hazardous, and disposable. Who cares what name was given at birth when nobody is left alive to remember what it once was? “Names were empty syllables, lost as easily as an entire world.” 

A Red Cross physician becomes Kwan instead of James when that name gives him the only chance to stay alive and find his child. A young boy whose brothers are blown apart by landmines as they approach a border of safety only knows his nickname, Nuong, which he will keep for the rest of his life. Another little boy tells his captors he is Rithy, not Sopham, and survives to learn which parts of the human body will yield a confession under interrogation, becoming a killer by the time he’s nine. His sister never tells what her name used to be; she becomes Mei in one of Angkar’s labor camps and then Janie when she’s sent by a refugee organization to the safety of a home in Canada. 

“If you want to be strong,” a boy says in the labor camp, “you have to become someone else. You have to take a new name.” 

“Inside us,” Janie’s mother tells her back in the days when the family lived in peace, “from the beginning, we were entrusted with many lives…we try to carry them until the end.” But thirty years later, Janie discovers she “knows too much” and has “too many selves.” Laden with memories that shadow her present life, she’s haunted by her little brother, Sopham. Unable to maintain her grip on him in the middle of an empty sea, she watched as “the ocean breathed him in.” 

Now her memories endanger her son. She no longer can trust herself to live with her husband and child because the minute that remembered violence engulfs her, she strikes out. When her colleague and mentor disappears in search of his brother, James, who vanished in the horror of Cambodia in 1975, Janie seizes a chance that will let her find the man who has become the only parent left to her. She returns to the country where she was born, where people who once were told to rid themselves of “memory sickness” and to forget their past history, live with ghosts who will “never be put to rest.”

“The soul is a slippery thing,” Janie’s mother told her, “but in darkness it can be returned to you.” In the darkness of what remains in Cambodia, Janie’s soul remembers the love and the beauty she once knew, in a time when that was as profuse and ordinary as air or water. She learns the necessity of guarding what’s precious and vital by placing dogs at the perimeter to safeguard those essential things. When she makes a phone call to her Canadian family, her son begs her, “Promise me. Don’t disappear,” and Janie makes that promise.

“The Khmer Rouge had taught us how to survive, walking alone, carrying nothing in our hands.” Piece by piece, Madeleine Thien shows how the Khmer people lost their names, lost their families, but survived to learn other names, other lives, other ways to love. Her novel recreates terrible damage and the agonizing process of recovery, with images that are unforgettable: ”tiny sequins of snow,” “light [that] spins over us like quiet laughter,” two children adrift at sea who are “caught on broken glass,” a prisoner feeling “his heart solidify in mute fear.” Normalcy and madness, the destruction of war and the confusion of peace, people who are privileged in their longing to keep their memories and those who wish they could lose their own--in an astounding act of literary alchemy, Thien makes these juxtapositions alive and agonizing and ultimately steeped in hope.~Janet Brown

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston (Knopf)

When Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior was published in 1976, it was a literary phenomenon on several levels. Memoir was a nascent genre, just beginning to be seen as different from autobiography. Folklore belonged to scholars and was seldom blended into literary works. Most of all, young Chinese Americans had yet to find a footing in the world of best-sellers. Long before Amy Tan became famous for The Joy Luck Club or Jung Chang electrified readers with Wild Swans, Hong Kingston’s first book soared to the top of national best-seller lists and won the National Critics Circle Award. Almost fifty years after it first appeared in bookstores, it’s still selected by book clubs for discussions. It’s become a classic, praised, criticized, and loved.

Cover of the first edition of The Woman Warrior

Although its subtitle proclaims it’s a memoir, Hong Kingston mingles family history with folk tales and enigmatic glimpses of her own life. This isn’t a linear narrative as much as it is a collection of personal essays that range over space and time. 

An ancestor who strayed from her marital vows in a small Chinese village and threw herself and her newborn illegitimate child into a well is used by Hong Kingston’s mother as a cautionary example of why girls should guard their chastity. Hong Kingston turns the disgraced woman into the leading figure in a vivid piece of fiction and concludes that her suicide was an act of rebellion and warfare, since she drowned herself in the village’s source of drinking water.

An extended folk tale follows the life of a mythic swordswoman whose bravery rivals Mu Lan’s. Much later, this “woman warrior’s” name is given to Hong Kingston’s mother, herself a redoubtable and unvanquished opponent in her daughter’s eyes. Brave Orchid buried two children in China and was trained as a village doctor, a respected professional before she joined her husband to begin a new family and run a laundry business in America. When her sister, Moon Orchid, comes to the U.S., Brave Orchid drives the new arrival into madness by hurling her into the deep end of a new culture. Raising her American-born children in the Chinese fashion, she creates barriers and confusion as her offspring grow up. Not until her most rebellious daughter is near adulthood does Brave Orchid explain that the girl has misunderstood why she had always been called ugly, to confuse predatory spirits who might seize the child if she was acknowledged as beautiful. “My American life,” Hong Kingston says, “ has been such a disappointment…I’m not a bad girl, I would scream." She is being raised to do battle and prevail as a victor.

For Brave Orchid, America is filled with ghosts--Taxi Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Newsboy Ghosts. In China, she knew how to battle specters. In America, she uses her children to combat these new ghostly figures. Aging in a country that she’s never accepted as her own, she insists “I would still be young if we lived in China,” ignoring her daughter’s insistence that “Time is the same from place to place.” And yet when Moon Orchid arrives, steeped in the behavior of a Chinese lady, Brave Orchid reveals how American she herself has become in her years away from China, shocking her sister as she pushes her into a new world. 

Living in a household dominated by contradictions and traditions that exist only within the walls of their home, Hong Kingston and her siblings learn early on which behaviors to choose. “I want to be a lumberjack,” Hong Kingston says when she’s a little girl. To make sense of the world Brave Orchid lives in, Hong Kingston turns history into fiction and finds answers in folklore.

She writes with the evocative language of a poet, blending it with the unflinching harshness of a girl who has been raised to fight, to protect her parents, as a woman warrior. ~Janet Brown

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 group all recognized a common truth: children are irrevocably shaped by their first seven years of life. 

Anne Anlin Cheng lived in Taiwan until she was ten. 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 words 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 her 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, it proves to be as virulent as the physical virus.

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. She explores 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 prompts Cheng to observe the similarities 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 universal truth 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

We Do Not Part by Han Kang, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth, Random House, release date 1/21/2025)

Kyungha is a writer who’s haunted by nightmares of black human forms standing in the snow as the tide surges toward them, of massacres that send women and their children down the steep side of a well to escape death, of holding a single flaming match that  could reveal the face of a mass murderer. Engulfed by these phantoms, she struggles to overcome them and to regain her life. 

When a friend summons her to a hospital room, she finds the photographer and filmmaker with whom she’s worked for years, immobilized and crippled by an accident that took place when working in a rural studio. Inseon is from the island of Jeju, where she has lived alone in the company of a caged bird. Pleading with Kyungha to go to her home and give the bird food and water before it’s too late, Inseon persuades her to leave Seoul and travel to Jeju, in spite of an approaching snowstorm that threatens to make the journey impossible. 

Arriving on the last flight before the storm hits, waiting beside a lonely road for the bus that will take her close to Inseon’s house, Kyungha at last begins a walk to safety that instead plummets her into a deep pit. When she emerges, she’s lost her phone and when she enters Inseon’s dark, cold house, she finds the bird is dead.

Suddenly this story slips into the hallucinatory quality of Kyungha’s nightmares. The bird that she buries returns to life. The friend whom she had left in the confinement of a hospital ward suddenly appears in the unheated house and begins to reveal the history that Inseon’s mother lived through and archived, in notebooks, letters, and newspaper articles. The massacres that have haunted Kyungha’s sleep unfold as a tragedy of death and horror, one that was covered up the minute after it took place. Bodies were buried under the runway of Jeju Airport; shot as they waded out to sea where the waves carried off their corpses; dumped into pits where the snow covered and erased them, staying invisible for thirty-four years and remaining forever anonymous.

The dead dominate in this eerie novel. But who is dead? Who’s alive? Perhaps the most vivid character is Inseon’s dead mother, forcing her history upon her daughter and Kyungha, telling her terrible stories in a voice that lives through pieces of saved paper. “Extermination was the goal.”

Extermination is what fills the history and the nightmares, wrapped in the surrealism of snowfall: Snowflakes land on the fronds of palm trees and freeze bright blossoms; snow crystals “swirl wildly as if inside a giant popcorn machine;” snow clouds emerging“like tens of thousands of white-feathered birds flying right along the horizon.” Snow extinguishes the light of a final candle and threatens the life of the one remaining match, held by a woman who may already be a ghost.

We Do Not Part is an unsettling work of art, with each sentence holding a new masterpiece of beautiful and bone-chilling words. It should be read slowly, like poetry, because the narrative is unbearably painful if approached in the way novels are usually consumed. Han Kang combines the supernatural with the inhuman, history with its denial, the living with the dead, as she blurs every boundary line, with the finality of snow.~Janet Brown

Han Kang received the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature five days after this review was posted.

The Foreign Student by Susan Choi (HarperCollins)

It begins like a fairy tale. The lonely traveler walks through the night to a place he’s never been before, where a kind old woman gives him a place to sleep. In the morning a beautiful young woman takes the foreign stranger to his new home and tells him about an older man who will help him as he learns to live and study in a rural paradise.

But, as it is in fairy tales, nothing is as perfect as it first appears to be. Chang has survived years of war, sickness, and starvation that his Southern counterparts have never even thought of. On a Tennessee campus, he’s called Chuck by classmates who regard him with “a subtly unremitting scrutiny, disguised as politeness” and who mistake his “limited English for a limited knowledge of things.” Chang likes that; it gives him “a hidden advantage,” which he uses to his benefit, along with his “infinite patience for listening.” Seen as an object of charity, he hides secrets which emerge only in his half-remembered nightmares.

The young woman who first helped him has secrets of her own. From the time she was fourteen, she has had a sexual relationship with the older professor whom she advises Chang to take as a mentor. She has inherited her childhood home and is still enmeshed in her childhood liaison with the man who has known her since she was a little girl. Although rumors swirl around her, Katherine has set herself apart in a cocoon of loneliness. 

“You’re the first new thing here in a while,” she tells Chang. As she slowly begins to form a friendship with this stranger, both of them peer at each other through their veils of secrets, each beginning to feel trust without knowing why.

Although a love story teases at the edges of this novel, the story belongs to Chang. Gradually bits of his history are revealed: his early friendship with a rebellious boy who joins the guerrilla movement against the government of South Korea, his English proficiency that gives him a job as a translator for the American presence in his country, his abandonment, survival, and betrayal. Scenes of torture lie in counterpoint to the tentative peace that he and Katherine find together, darkening Chang’s dreams and tarnishing the possibility of his finding happiness.

Susan Choi brilliantly unfolds Chang’s world as he leaves the safety of the Southern campus and goes to Chicago, a metropolis where he’s “surrounded and invisible,” where there are “so many ways he could slip into life.” After a summer of living in the city’s Japantown, Chang can “no longer imagine the lack of imagination he’d arrived with.” As he encounters new dreams, he begins to face his nightmares and dares to believe he might deserve a life, one filled with love and without charitable condescension

As he and Katherine slowly release “the wariness they both turned toward the world,” they find new ways of living within it, bringing hope and joy to a novel that has been shrouded in the immobility of pain. Choi’s recreation of history, her skillful creation of characters who may never have appeared in fiction before, and her ability to paint unforgettable landscapes with precise and evocative words make her debut novel stunning and unforgettable.~Janet Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shanghailanders by Juli Min (Spiegel and Grau)

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

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

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

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

And yet as the years fly backwards, unhappiness settles in like a rot. Leo’s wife plans to leave him but her plans are set aside when she learns one of her daughters needs an abortion. His oldest daughter is a kleptomaniac who has made cruelty her second-favorite hobby. His youngest, at sixteen, has discovered a flair for sex work. His mother-on-law, teetering on the edge of dementia and living in a palatial assisted-living facility in France, has recently been diagnosed with an STD. Leo “loved them, all of them,” but he has lost interest. Slipping into another life is a thought he occasionally entertains, but—”how tiring.”

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

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

A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje (Knopf)

Michael Ondaatje is almost legendary, a prolific writer with such creative energy and abundant talent that it’s hard to believe he’s reached the age of 83. Over the past fifty-nine years, he’s written twenty-two books: a book about film-making, a family memoir, seven novels, and thirteen books of poetry, including the recently published The Last Year.

Although this title sounds elegiac, these poems are not. They draw upon a life that Ondaatje has steeped in literature and enriched by living on several different continents. They celebrate the precise beauty of words and use imagery from Ondaatje’s first home, Sri Lanka. They are tender and sensuous, capturing moments with lovers and friends. And yes, there are eulogies that honor the memories of household animals who died old.

Above all, they are fragments of autobiography, told at a slant, never confessional, always alluring.

In his evocation of his Sri Lankan roots, Running in the Family (Asia by the Book, October 2007), Ondaatje mentions the kabaragoya, a monitor lizard the size of a crocodile, which an early explorer described as having “a blew forked tongue, which he puts forth.” A smaller relative of this lizard is prized because eating its tongue gives eloquence.” Both of these creatures are blended into one and become part of Dante in the poem Last Things. In an Italian piazza, a statue of Dante falls and the shape of a lizard “crawls out of shattered plaster, a blue rough tongue slithering…a finished book in his mouth.”

A similar echo is found in the poem Dark Garden, where a woman Ondaatje has not yet met but will someday love steps on a nail at the time he imagines one of his characters having a splinter pulled from her foot, “That faraway echo and coincidence” mirrors the final chapter of The English Patient when Kirpal and Hannah, separated by time and space, each see a household object fall at the same moment.

A man enthralled by language, Ondaatje, in his poem Definition, says “All afternoon I stroll the plotless thirteen hundred pages of a Sanskrit dictionary,” where he finds the word ansa, and gives it to the woman he loves, for “the warmth of that word for your shoulder blade.” The English patient springs into life in that poem, searching for the word that will name “that hollow at the base of a woman’s neck.”

In a mixture of poems and small essays, lives unfold. “The dyers who steal color out of the bark of trees to paint temples,” unnamed lovers who exist in a realm that’s “still all coal and smoke,” the dog whose death is “courteous and beautiful,” They all evoke memories of other stories, while breathing on their own and lingering in a new corner of the mind. “Nothing remains still in a story,” Ondaatje says to those readers who recognize shadows from his previous work. 

A Year of Last Things begins and ends with rivers, “the wet dark rectangle,” “all those echoing rivers.” And suddenly Lalla comes to mind, the glamorous, eccentric grandmother who often stopped her car to swim in a river, who stepped off her front porch one night and was swept into a flood that “was her last perfect journey.”

This is the gift that Michael Ondaatje always offers: each of his books brings new portions of beauty while taking us back into other wonders that he’s placed in our minds and hearts, sweeping us into an unending “perfect journey.”~Janet Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang (Random House)

In 1978 a Taiwan manufacturer established the Taiwan Handbag Factory in an isolated corner of Guangdong Province. It was the only foreign factory to have come to the small town of Dongguan, a place without railway connections or roads. It hired local labor but soon needed to augment that supply with migrant labor from rural China. Two years later Deng Xaoping established the first of China’s Special Economic Zones in Shenzhen, fifty miles from Dongguan. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Factory girls are the leaders of a social revolution. The money they bring to their parents give them a position of power. At the Lunar New Year, they are the ones who present envelopes of money to their elders and household decisions rest with them. As they gain positions of status in the workplace, they often outrank the men they date and use that power to their advantage. Chunming’s stock phrase when finding a man didn’t measure up to her standards is “Let’s just be friends, then,” which she often pronounces in a matter of minutes.

Pragmatic and ambitious, these girls set personal goals that dominate their time away from their jobs. Chunming keeps a diary and studies Ben Franklin’s Thirteen Rules of Morality. When direct sales come to China, promising a route to prosperity, speaking skills are a path to success and young women flock to classes that give them that ability. English is so in demand that the Taiwan-owned Yue Yuen plant that manufactured Nike, Adidas, and Reebok, offers English classes onsite at their gated facility, a place that also has a kindergarten, a movie theater, and a hospital.

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

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

Other Rivers by Peter Hessler (Penguin Press)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bangkok Babylon by Jerry Hopkins (Tuttle Publishing)

Among any of us who have spent time in Southeast Asia, a common observation is prevalent—that nobody is more tedious than an old white guy who’s rooted to a Bangkok bar stool. Jerry Hopkins, a man who has occupied many a bar stool in Bangkok (and other places), not only disputes that point of view, he refutes it. Telling the stories of men he has met on twenty-five different bar stools in Thailand’s capital, he proves his point of view. At least during his lifetime, some of the most intriguing people on earth were sitting in some of the most notorious bars in Bangkok. In Bangkok Babylon, he tells their stories and there’s not a boring one in the entire book.

Only a few of these are ones Hopkins wasn’t told directly by the profile subjects. He never met the man who has been called the inspiration for the Marlon Brando figure in Apocalypse Now, Tony Poe, nor the pianist who played for years at the best hotel in Bangkok and who turned out to be a vicious pedophile. In the case of the pianist, Hopkins quotes the lengthy confession that Eric Rossner sent to a Thai newspaper and briefly describes a videotape Rossner had made of time he spent with a ten-year-old girl. Tony Poe’s story comes from Poe’s close friend and colleague, Jack Shirley, a man who had been a self-described “journeyman killer” employed by the DEA and who worked with Poe in at least one successful assassination. 

These stories are counterbalanced by twenty-two others that are much less lurid but equally fascinating. Hopkins’ best friend, whom he terms an “urban guerilla priest,” is a man who’s devoted his life to the largest Bangkok slum, a rebel who knows how to say the Mass in Hmong and knocks back bottles of Heineken. Father Joe is a warrior who has battled the Thai power structure successfully enough that the slum he lives in now has a school, a 24-hour medical clinic, a credit union, and housing for orphans and abandoned children. His story is followed by interviews with the man who made Lonely Planet’s guide to Thailand a bible to travelers all around the world and with the college drop-out who turned abused elephants into musicians with their own symphony orchestra.

A man who once made his living by dressing up as Friar Tuck and selling advice at Renaissance Faires before making a life for himself in Thailand tells Hopkins “If you’re going to get a story out of me, you’ll have to pull and twist, and then make it up, because it’s not there.” He was wrong. If Hopkins had one religious belief, it was “Thou shalt not make things up.” Disdaining Somerset Maugham as “a predatory gossip,” Hopkins had a thousand untold stories that he refused to write, because, he said, “they aren’t mine to tell.” Every living man whom he interviewed for Bangkok Babylon was given the right of refusal. They each read their profile before the book was published and all of them approved what had been written.

The result is an oral history told by a group of eccentric expats to a reporter who likens himself to Forrest Gump, a man in the right place at the right time, who decided when he was young that he’d “travel the world, meet interesting people, and write about them.” Fortunately, one of the “interesting people” whose story is included in this book is Hopkins himself, a journalist who wrote for Rolling Stone, booked “kooks” for Steve Allen’s television show, had the first head-shop in Los Angeles, and was on the New York Times bestseller list for his biography of Jim Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive, which is still in print since its debut in 1980.

Of Bangkok Babylon, Hopkins says somewhat wistfully, “ this book may be a celebration of a part of Southeast Asia that is sliding into the past…” Yes. It is—and a fine celebration at that.~Janet Brown

Mistapim in Cambodia by Christopher Pym (Hodder & Stoughton)

Not many people traveled to Angkor Wat in 1954. The French War in Vietnam, which had spilled into Cambodia, had just ended. Although it remained a French colony until the end of the year, Cambodia was too absorbed with preparing itself as a newly independent nation to concern itself with tourism.

It was a Thai prince who organized a sightseeing expedition to Angkor and a member of this group was a young Englishman who was working in what was at that time called Malaya. At 25, Christopher Pym was still young enough to swerve from secure employment into charting his own adventure and when he fell in love with the glories of the ancient Khmer empire, this is what he did.

He began an intensive study of Cambodian history and the Khmer language, moving to Phnom Penh in 1956 without a safety net, determined to “carve one’s own set of circumstances,”

In Malaya, his life had been comfortable. The business firm Pym had worked for in that country had provided everything--”car, house,cook, gardener, cocktails, and so on.” This isn’t the way he wants to live in Cambodia; he finds a wooden house on stilts on the outskirts of Phnom Penh and almost immediately comes down with dengue fever. Moving back to the city, he rents a small room that is next to a shrine for a Chinese deity. His domestic comforts are limited to a bed, a table, and a wooden crate, but unlike his first home, this place has electricity and a rudimentary bathroom.

Learning Khmer and teaching English gives Pym the life he wants, with freedom to travel in search of “the heart of the Khmer people.” After an evening of opium-smoking at the home of a French acquaintance, he decides he isn’t going to find the heart of Cambodia in the company of Europeans in Phnom Penh and he begins to explore village life.

While urban Cambodians are jaded when it comes to foreigners, Pym is a delightful novelty to rural communities who are more than willing to let him witness and chronicle their ways of life. Although he has fleeting contacts with Cambodia’s royal family, Pym becomes close to people of less exalted lineage and he much prefers to spend his time with them.

Perhaps his favorite brush with royalty is when he’s a spectator at the funeral of one of the princes of the realm. The royal tomb has gone unused for many years and “a combined attack of blunt pickaxes and old crowbars” fail to open the entrance--until a member of the King’s family grabs a pickaxe, throws his jacket aside and leads “a continuing onslaught,” royal privilege be damned.

But any prince of the realm pales beside Pym’s friendship with Om, “a kind of Khmer teddy-boy.” Westernized but “not a delinquent,” Om opens village life and its daily life in a way no prince could ever have done. Because of him, Pym is given free access to Buddhist ordinations, engagement ceremonies, and “ a positively Aristophanic marriage-feast.”. He describes all of these events in photographic detail and with deep respect, without a trace of condescension or British snark.

Even in Phnom Penh, which clearly isn’t his favorite place in Cambodia, he only allows himself a tiny tinge of bitterness when he comes across “a milkbar neon-lit,” and thinks, “Well done, Cambodia, the same as everywhere else at last.”

Pym was lucky--he took up residence in Cambodia when ceremonies and rituals and village life still mirrored what was carved in bas-relief on the walls of the Bayon and Angkor Wat. He journeyed to the distant reaches of the kingdom by oxcart during the rainy season to view the citadel of Bantei Chmar, before looters dismantled it “stone by stone.” And he was invited to see a performance of the Royal Khmer Ballet within the royal palace, watching “the eloquent hands of the Khmer dancers” as they performed The Abduction of Sita from the Ream Ker, the Khmer Ramayana.

There are hints of change in Pym’s accounts--electric lights replacing the gigantic candle that illuminates the months when monks retreat to their temples, an American “education center” being built in the countryside, and rebel insurgents preventing a journey to a village near the Thai border. As the “temptation to go to Samrong just for fun increased in proportion as the police insisted upon my not going there,” Pym, respectful as always, doesn’t break his word.

The only facetious part of this book is its title, which Pym at the outset assures readers “was chosen by the publishers.” Although he can’t resist flashes of humor, he writes with a scrupulous lack of judgment that an anthropologist would envy and gives meticulous glimpses of Cambodian life that are worthy of Zhao Daguan, back in the days of the Angkor Empire. Thank you, Mistapim.~Janet Brown

The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei by Sachaverell Sitwell (Weidenfeld and Nicolson)

Take one well-born aging Englishman, with a classical education that has centered around Europe, throw him into Asia, and watch him flounder when he’s not in places that were once part of the British Empire. The intellectual consternation that engulfs this sort of gentleman should be amusing but his excellent education keeps that from happening. Instead pomposity takes over, with rare moments of enchantment that veer on the naive. 

For a prime example of this, try to read Sachaverell Sitwell’s The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei.  A member of England’s hereditary peerage and the grandson of an Earl, Sitwell went to Eton and Oxford and was first published when he was twenty-five. This volume of poetry launched a career of writing over fifty books, almost all of them devoted to European art, music, and architecture. When he began to age, he turned his attention to other continents, venturing to Japan and Peru, but never deviating from his Eurocentric point of view.

The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei is a misleading title which desperately needs a follow-up subtitle along the lines of And Other Travels in Asia, since only one brief chapter is devoted to what is now spelled “Banteay Srei.” This is probably a mercy because Sitwell is ill at ease in that lovely place or anywhere else in the Angkor complex. That he devotes only five chapters to Cambodia is a relief but that’s almost enough to sink this book.

Sitwell starts off in a sprightly fashion by falling in love with Bangkok. His time there is brief and comfortable, with a room in the Oriental Hotel and trips to places that aren’t yet tourist cliches--The Temple of the Emerald Buddha, floating markets which are still plentiful and utilitarian in the early 1960s, a night at a Thai boxing match. There he concludes that muay thai is “more serious and less amusing than the Sumo wrestling in Japan” and worries that an injured boxer may never be able to fight again. He’s delighted by the broken crockery that ornaments temple chedis and is impressed by the air-con in a Chinese restaurant that has his wife begging for a towel to use as a shawl during dinner. It’s sweet to see him fall in love with Thailand’s capital, which he explores without comparisons or judgments. Those he saves for Cambodia, where he seems determined to denigrate the glories of Angkor.

Although Sitwell confesses he came to Angkor “after half a lifetime of anticipation,” the heat, “of a kind and degree never experienced before,” and the humidity which “was something excessive,” appears to have flattened his enthusiasm. Although he immediately claims “the approach to Angkor Wat is on a grander scale than anything in the living world” and is later awed by the Bayon’s face-towers, he swiftly begins to describe the “sham buildings” constructed by people whom, he claims, had no conception of how to build a spacious room. He lapses into memories of blitzed London during World War I and begins to long for the “cooing of doves” and a “wood of bluebells.” If it weren’t for his frequent quotes of Zhou Daguan’s eyewitness accounts of Angkor, there would be no substance to his observations, which conclude with “this is a whole dead city…too big even for poetry.”

Things don’t improve in Nepal, where Sitwell becomes obsessed with the sexual nature of temple paintings. He tears himself away from erotic art long enough to write a detailed description of “a living goddess in Katmandu,” a heavily made-up child of twelve, the sight of whom made him decide she was “wonderfully, and a little pruriently exciting.” Once again he wallows in comparisons to Greece, Italy, and Spain and it’s impossible not to wish for the ability to slap him.

India, since the Empire had left it twenty years before, is a sad disappointment to Sitwell, who mourns that hotel dining rooms no longer serve proper English meals and that Delhi’s “houses with pillared porticos and nice gardens” are no longer inhabited by British families. Except for the brilliant colors of women’s clothing, Delhi is a disappointment but he consoles himself with a visit to the Taj Mahal and the Pearl Mosque, which he manages to view without his customary litany of European comparisons. Jaipur’s gardens, however, “did credit to English seedsmen,” and the Italian lakes immediately come into play when he goes to Udaipur. At Bombay he’s thrilled to find streets with English names and statues of British luminaries which might prove to console him when he discovers the Caves of Ajanta “are now too far gone with age to give pleasure.”

At this point anyone who’s persisted in reading Sitwell’s observations would be justified in saying the same of him. It’s a vast relief when he goes to Ceylon and becomes enthralled with its beauty. Perhaps his lack of jaundiced criticisms is because in Columbo he’s able to have a cocktail. “After a sojourn in India the inventor of Singapore Slings deserves commendation.”

Sitwell, sadly, does not--in fact the only way that his book should be read is in the company of several Singapore Slings as anesthesia against his pomposity. The reader is warned, as Sitwell’s Victorian forbears used to say--stock up on gin and limes before entering his realm of boring ethnocentricism.~Janet Brown

The Road to Angkor by Christopher Pym (John Beaufoy Publishing)

There’s a certain kind of British male who confirms Noel Coward’s assertion that mad dogs and Englishmen are attracted to the midday sun and Christopher Pym is a fine example of this. Like many travelers, he was enchanted by Angkor Wat in 1954. However he, in his early twenties, acted upon that enchantment by spending the next three years studying Cambodian history and learning the Khmer language, in London, Paris, and Cambodia. In 1957, armed with a knowledge of that country’s culture, past and present, and with French and Khmer language fluency, the 27-year-old academic sets off on an adventure that verges on insanity. He intends to walk from the part of South Vietnam that had once been the empire of Champa to Angkor Wat, looking for evidence of the ancient road that had supposedly once connected these two strongholds, with 57 resthouses sprinkled along the way. If Pym could find evidence of these resthouses close to his starting point, he’d know the road had actually existed. As it was, at the time he begins this trek, traces of the road had only been found between Angkor and the citadel of Prah Khan in northern Cambodia, with nothing proving a route between Prah Khan and what was once Champa. Ten weeks, he decides, will be enough time for this walk, one that he’s making on foot because he can’t afford horses or elephants as transportation.

But this isn’t complicated enough for Pym. Neolithic tools had been found in the Vietnamese city of Pleiku and he hopes to find more along his route, confirming that a Neolithic culture had spread across the region. He also has a whimsical goal in mind. He’d read about a tribal hillside chieftain, described by an early French explorer as being “young, handsome, brave, quick, eloquent and confident in the future.” This paragon of manly virtues was named Pim and this is enough to prompt his English namesake to look for him, as “an entertaining sidetrack.”

Pym discovers the most arduous part of this enterprise is getting the necessary permits from bureaucrats, which is a prevailing hardship throughout the book. But in the freewheeling spirit that never leaves him, he uses that hurdle to observe the differences between Vietnamese in Saigon, Cambodian monks in a temple near his starting point, and the Chinese in Cholon--”the way they talked, the way they washed, the way they spat.” Pym, unlike many of his countrymen, makes no value judgments nor shows traces of racism, but it becomes clear that he prefers the company of Cambodians, probably because he’s able to speak their language. One of his few moments of petulance surfaces when a Khmer official insists on conversing with him exclusively in French.

Carrying a rucksack that weighs over thirty pounds that he’s filled with 1000 cigarettes and four pounds of candy to give as gifts along the way, as well as a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and wearing “car-tyre sandals,” Pym travels less than 14 miles on his first day and fails to reach his initial goal, Pim’s village. On the following day he meets a man who claims he’s related to Pim, “the son of his brother.”

“It was a recognition worthy of a Greek play.” Although Pim died years earlier, his relatives are delighted that a foreigner has come in search of him and the next few days are spent drinking rice wine and existing in an “alcoholic stupor.” 

Drunk or sober, Pym never loses his talent of observation that he cloaks in understatement, delighted by the sight of a Vietnamese woman garbed in a heavy Norwegian sweater, taken aback by nights when the air becomes “quite nippy,” and politely eating “several kinds of unsavory vegetable soup.” When he’s presented with a grilled tiger steak, he overcomes his initial qualms and finds that it’s “most delicious.”

Having found traces of Pim, his next goal is discovering Neolithic tools. Given an axehead that falls into that category, Pym is satisfied, although his prized possession is a much more modern one--a sabre that he’s seen tribesmen carry and has longed to own. “There were none on sale at the market” but when he meets a man who owns two, he’s able to purchase the extra one. Now armed against tigers, Pym is able to disregard his bleeding feet and makes his way through “the sugar palm curtain” that marks the Cambodian border. 

Here he finds a flourishing industry of zirconia pit-mining as well as a Khmer Gold Rush near an “unsavory village.” Peasant life, he decides, is “like an antique pitcher with myriad cracks” that’s held together by Buddhism.

Pym turns out to be one of those delightful explorers for whom the journey is more important than the goal and this makes him a fantastic armchair travel companion. His inability to find traces of the road that led from Prah Khan to Champa is thoroughly eclipsed by the stories he gathers on his 450-mile, 7-week odyssey. These make The Road to Angkor a diverting travel narrative--and make me eager to find the book that followed this one, Mistapim in Cambodia.  Christopher Pym, where have you been all my life?~Janet Brown 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evergreen by Naomi Hirahara (Soho)

When Aki Nakasone and her parents return to Los Angeles after years in an internment camp and an involuntary relocation to Chicago, their hometown feels unwelcoming and unfamiliar. “Ban the Jap” committees prevent them from moving into many areas in the city, Little Tokyo is filled with Black transplants from the South, and Aki feels lucky to find a house in the Jewish neighborhood of Boyle Heights. Many others who have returned from the camps can only find temporary housing in trailers and old army barracks.

She’s also fortunate to land a job in the Japanese Hospital as a nurse’s aid, because California is mulling over propositions that will limit the livelihoods open to Japanese Americans. There are rumors that the state intends to confiscate property owned by Japanese Americans under an act of escheat, and the Ku Klux Klan is a legal entity under California law. 

When one of Aki’s elderly patients turns out to be covered with bruises, she’s surprised to find that the old man is the father of one of her husband’s best friends, who was best man at her wedding. His dismissive reaction to his father’s injuries shocks Aki and when the old man later dies in the hospital from a gunshot wound, her suspicions flare into life when the son is nowhere to be found.

As Aki searches for the missing son, she becomes drawn into the scattered community of  internment camp returnees and the underworld that flourishes in post-war Los Angeles. Police corruption and rampant prejudice impede her efforts to find the dead man’s only relative, plunging her into a perilous and frightening mission. To complicate matters, the man Aki married in a whirlwind wartime romance has come home from the battlefield with memories that trouble his sleep and have turned him into a stranger.

In this sequel to Clark and Division (Asia by the Book, July 2022), Naomi Hirahara once again uses a compelling mystery to bring past history to light. Aki’s husband is one of the “Go for Broke Boys,” a member of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, part of the 100th Infantry Battalion that fought in Europe while their own families were interned in U.S. camps. In less than two years these two units earned over 4000 Purple Hearts and 4000 Bronze Star medals, only to face discrimination when they returned to the United States. In a heartbreaking portion of Evergreen, a member of the 442nd is unable to marry the woman he loves unless the couple elopes to another state--California’s anti-miscegenation law isn’t repealed until 1948, three years after the war ended.

Hirahara’s deep dive into history and her skill in creating intricate mystery plots are brightened by bursts of descriptions that are original and lovely. “Palm trees swaying against a bleed of pink,” and “windows spilled sun on tile floors” make readers understand why Aki and her family, along with so many other, returned to Los Angeles and fought against steep and daunting odds to make it their home once again. ~Janet Brown

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

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

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

Chang had me hooked with her essay,  Peking Opera through Foreign Eyes, where she asserts that ignorance of its subtleties only increases the enjoyment. If the audience isn’t aware of how it should be performed, then it has no niggling criticisms and can simply be delighted by the pageantry and spectacle. As an ignorant and passionate devotee of Chinese opera who has sat on a sidewalk for hours to enjoy outdoor performances of this art-form, thrilling to the “sharp, anxious tattoo of percussion” that punctuate the “kicks and jousts and feints,” I began to love the mind of Eileen Chang. When she went on to say “Chinese people like the law, and they like breaking the law too…by way of trivial violations of the rules,” I remembered the times I saw this happen in Beijing and embarked upon a silent conversation with Chang as I read. And when she discusses “the chamber pot strategem,” when the soul of a dead man is imprisoned in a chamber pot, I knew this was a plot device that could only be created by people who had intimate knowledge of an outdoor privy (or as we called this in Alaska, an outhouse).

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

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

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

Coming Home Crazy by Bill Holm (Milkweed Editions)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Knife by Salman Rushdie (Random House)

In 1988, Salman Rushdie became a symbol. His fifth novel, The Satanic Verses, enraged the Muslim world and led the Ayatolla Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, to call for his assassination. 

A fatwah was issued, a legal decree that is irrevocable. It guarantees that as long as Rushdie draws breath, he can be murdered with impunity, under Shia Islamic law.  It also guaranteed that to millions of people, Rushdie was a target while to millions more he was an icon of free speech. 

A target? An icon? When Rushdie decided to live without fear and with pleasure, then he was derided as a “party animal.” It took him almost thirty years to find a place where he could be happy and escape the different narratives that tried to put him in an assortment of pigeonholes. He was, he said, “famous not so much for my books as for the mishaps of my life.”

Then, six years later,  soon before his twenty-first novel was released, he went to speak at the Chautauqua Institution. An idyllic spot in rural New York, this is a place that, for 150 years, has dedicated itself to ideas, thoughts, and discussion that would foster the growth of a civil society. It’s a sanctuary that has never seen violence. So when a man burst out of the audience as Rushdie began to speak, nobody moved in the minute or two that it took the assailant to reach the stage. Until he pulled out a knife and began to stab, 27 seconds passed before someone realized this was not performance art.

In under half a minute, Rushdie is almost mortally wounded in an attack that would change his life once again, trying to pin him to a fate that was prompted by somebody else’s actions. He’s 75 years old. It will  take him six weeks to leave his hospital bed and far longer than that to undergo agonizing therapy. “You’re lucky,” a doctor told him, “that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.”

But the flawed attack puts Rushdie in “a one-eyed, one-handed world.” The simple act of tooth-brushing becomes an ordeal and before his left hand is mobile again, a therapist has to chip away at a thick layer of dried blood. His right eye is gone forever. The knife had reached the optic nerve.

But even when he was comatose, Rushdie’s creativity was brilliantly alive. Unconscious, he envisioned palaces whose building blocks were the alphabet and when he finally opened his surviving eye, he saw golden letters floating between his bed and the people who stood beside it. From the very beginning of this, he knew that although “the knife had severed me…language was my knife.” 

Unable to return home for security reasons once he’s released from the hospital, he still has his “home in literature and the imagination.” He claims his story and reclaims his life. He writes Knife.

Reading this book is a humbling and inspiring experience. Rushdie’s language is playful and discursive, thoughtful and creative. Being given an entrance to his mind and trying to keep up with him is dizzying and sometimes vexing, and his story, told without a softening filter, is often harrowing. But it never lapses into self-pity. A man who was brutally forced out of the life he had created takes full possession of where he has been put by someone who attacked him as a symbol that was “disingenuous.” In his mid-seventies, Rushdie seizes his “second chance” at being alive without clinging to “ an irretrievably lost past.” In his old age, this ageless artist continues to “sing the truth and name the liars.” ~Janet Brown