Making the Chinese Mexican by Grace Pena Delgado (Stanford University Press)

When England abolished the slave trade in 1807 and ended slavery within its empire in 1833, the need for cheap labor became an issue everywhere but the United States, until the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation thirty years later. Caribbean sugar plantations found a labor solution in coolies imported from China, a practice that spread into South America. 

A Mexican politician, convinced that he could make a fortune from growing coffee in the scorching climate of Chiapas, advocated the importation of Chinese laborers into his country, as they already were in Peru, Brazil, and Cuba. Lack of infrastructure within Mexico to transport workers to the areas where they were needed, as well as the hellish climate of the coastal and jungle work sites, diverted the Chinese labor force to the more amenable areas of the United States. While only 1000 Chinese were part of the Mexican labor force in the mid-1800s, over 100,000 worked in the United States by the end of the 19th century.

With the completion of America’s transcontinental railroad, the need for cheap labor diminished and xenophobia increased. Mining in the Arizona Territory attracted immigrant labor from England, Ireland, and Mexico. Chinese workers trickled down from California and still more arrived from China, increasing the Territory’s Chinese population from 20 to over 1500 in ten year’s time.

But the increasing number of white Americans arriving in Arizona brought the “demonization” of Chinese workers with them. The threat of miscegenation was brandished in lurid fashion, along with the belief that “wily Mongolians” were taking jobs from American citizens. In the mining town of Bisbee, widows of mine workers resorted to taking in laundry to make ends meet and they claimed Chinese laundries were taking bread from the mouths of their fatherless children. Washerwomen in Tombstone added their complaints to the furor and laundering became a forbidden occupation to Chinese “adjunct labor” in mining areas.

Tucson was less restrictive with its diversity of population, with Mexicans making up 64% of the town’s population. One of the leading businessmen, Leopoldo Carrillo, began renting small tracts of land to Chinese truck farmers. As these farmers achieved success, some opened grocery and dry goods stores and even laundries. An economic kinship grew between Tucson’s Mexicans and Chinese, with Mexican families renting rooms to Chinese laborers and leasing land where Chinese families could build homes. Soon the area known as El Barrio where the Mexicans of Tucson lived became inhabited by Chinese workers. Although Tucson never had an officially established Chinatown, by 1883 the Chinese residents of El Barrio had established “four large buildings, two washhouses, three stores, two opium dens, and a block-long adobe structure that ‘lost all its Spanish-American attributes and [became] wholly oriental.”

The relationship that was formed between Chinese and Mexicans, a form of kith that could be as strong as kin, made it an easy matter for Chinese to flow across the porous border into Sonora, Mexico when U.S. immigration policies and racial discrimination made that country an unattractive destination. Chinese labor flooded into Mexico by ship and then were trafficked across the border to U.S. towns.  Others remained in Mexico, “becoming a vital part of Mexico’s economic reality.” By 1910, 13,203 Chinese lived in Sonora and other states of northern Mexico.

After the Mexican Revolution of 1911-1917, a strong anti-Chinese movement failed to discourage Chinese businessmen within Mexico  who understood that crossing the border into the U.S would bring them no relief, only the probability of deportation. By the mid-1920s the Chinese in Sonora owned 40% “of manufacturing firms and small-scale dry-goods shops while controlling 65% of all grocery stores.” Antichinista forces turned to vicious propaganda and violence; Chinese stores were raided and burned. Murders were not uncommon. Eventually the government, swayed by fears of miscegenation and disease, began the expulsion of 3,500 Chinese from Sonora, with the goal of expanding this throughout Mexico. 

Today there are estimated to be no more than 70,000 people of Chinese descent living in the entire country of Mexico.~Janet Brown

So Can You by Mitsuyo Ohira (Kodansha)

One of the major problems still facing Japan today is iijime. This is the Japanese word for “bullying”. Victims of bullying are still ostracized and treated as if the bullying were their fault. Schools often feign ignorance or disclaim deny claims of abuse. A lot of parents seem to be more concerned about appearances and gossip instead of the welfare of their children. Mitsuyo Ohira is one of those victims.

So Can You is based on her own story. She doesn’t hold back any punches and tells us the grim reality of what she went through. She talks about being bullied in junior high school, how it started, how it escalated, ultimately leading to her attempted suicide. The story doesn’t end there. So Can You is also a story of inspiration of how she, a junior high school graduate, was able to overcome impossible odds and become a lawyer.

Mitsuyo tells us up front, the actions in the book had taken place over twenty years ago and that her oppressors probably have no recollection of what they put her through but Ohira says, “But I haven’t forgotten. Even after twenty years, the memories come rushing back as vividly as if it had all taken place yesterday.”

The time was 1978. Due to a family situation, Mitsuyo had to transfer to a new school after the school year had already started. She was looking forward to going there and making new friends.  She enjoys being the center of attention. Her classmates did warn her about a student naemd “A-ko”. A-ko was the leader of the “bad” girls in Mitsuyo’s homeroom. Actually, she was the leader of all the “bad” girls in the first year. 

Mitsuyo thought if she just avoided A-ko and didn’t provoke her in any way, she wouldn’t have any problems. She was enjoying her status as a type of celebrity and with hindsight thinks maybe she was just a bit too pleased with herself. At some point in time, A-ko spoke to her but she didn’t reply. Little did Mitsuyo know that this little act of defiance would have consequences she never imagined.

First, her classmates starting ignoring her. At lunch time, nobody would sit with her or talk to her. Then came the graffiti. Someone had written on Mitsuyo’s desk, “I am a pathetic moron. Everyone hates me. If you want me, you can have me cheap.” It was signed with her name, homeroom and year. The bullying didn’t stop there. Soon, rumors were spread about Mitsuyo being “easy”. 

The second year, Mitsuyo thought she had made some new friends only to be betrayed by them. Their friendship was only a ruse to get Mitsuyo to let her guard down. Once again, Mitsuyo became the subject of a school-wide scandal and thought the only thing left to do is die, ultimately leading to her suicide attempt.

Throughout Mitsuyo’s junior high school years, she experiences being a victim of bullying, attempting suicide, and eventually follows the path into delinquency. Mitsuyo didn’t go to high school and scraped a living by working at a hostess club. A chance meeting with an old friend of her father’s at the hostess club was the turning point in Mitsuyo’s life. 

Ohira-san or “Otchan” as Mitsuyo knew him, becomes her mentor and gives her encouragement to make a new start on life. He is the first person to tell her that it is her fault for not even trying to change. Otchan lights the fire inspiring Mitsuyo to change.

Mitsuyo was not with her life, but with the encouragement of Ohira-san, she starts to set small goals for herself. Once she reaches one goal, Ohira-san encourages her to set an even higher one. This sets the stage for Mitsuyo, a junior high school graduate to attempt to pass the National Bar Exam and become a lawyer!  The story is heartbreaking and inspiring at the same time. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Burden of Flowers by Natsuki Ikezawa (Kodansha)

A Burden of Flowers is an English language version of the Japanese book  “Hana wo Hakobu Imouto”, translated by Alfred Birnbaum who has also translated many of Haruki Murakami’s novels into English. It literally translates to “The Sister Who Carries Flowers”. The book won the Mainichi Award for the year 2000, given by Mainichi Publishing, a subsidiary of the Mainichi Shimbun (newspaper). The story was inspired by true events that happened in the eighties. 

The two main characters are a brother and his younger sister, Tetsuro and Kaoru. Tetsuro “Tez” Nishijima is a successful artist and an avid traveler. He is also a recovering drug addict. He currently finds himself sitting in a prison cell in Bali, Indonesia.  Kaoru is five years younger than Tez. She is a Europhile and studied at the Sorbonne in France. Although she never graduated from the Sorbonne, she became fluent at speaking French and for the past five years, she had been living in various cities in Europe. Kaoru has moved back to Japan and her current job often requires her to work in Europe. 

So begins an incredible story of great courage and persistence of a young sister’s journey into the unknown world of international law and politics.With the help of a retired professor and two of his close and well-connected Indonesian friends, they take on the case to keep Kaoru’s brother from receiving the death sentence. 

The story is told through the eyes of Kaoru and Tez in alternating chapters. Kaoru’s story focuses on going through all the hurdles of red tape in Indonesia’s legal system. She is also witness to its corruption, having to deal with a police chief who is totally uncooperative and has already determined that Tez is guilty of heroin trafficking as Tez has already signed a confession admitting to his guilt.

Tetsuro’s story focuses on his reminisces about traveling through Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam It is in Thailand where he meets a German woman who leads him into the world of heroin use He thinks about his addiction, his rehabilitation and his relapse into using heroin again. Still, he doesn’t understand why the purchase of two grams of heroin calls for the death penalty. It is with hindsight that Tez realizes he has been framed as he is being charged with possession of 200 grams of heroin with intent to sell. 

Unknown to Tez or Kaoru, good fortune was on their side. The siblings discover the news at a later time after the charge against Tez had been reduced without explanation. They were shown a magazine article which was translated them for them. They were informed that the police chief was being investigated by a detective in the Independent Investigations Division and had been working undercover to investigate misconduct in regional police departments. The detective had been shot and left for dead but survived and managed to get help. 

The actions of the two main characters are excellently interwoven to provide the reader with a peak into a young woman’s uphill battle combating a corrupt system and a man coming to terms with his own actions which led him to his current predicament. The more you learn about Tez and his fall from grace, the more you want Kaoru to succeed. The suspense of the outcome keeps you riveted to the story.  ~Ernie Hoyt

The Dancing Girls of Lahore : Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan's Pleasure District by Louise Brown (Harper Perennial

In The Dancing Girls of Lahore, Lousie Brown, an academic who works and teaches at Birmingham University in England, spends four years living amongst the women who work in Heera Mandi, a neighborhood and bazaar located in Lahore, Pakistan. It is also Lahore’s red light district. In the day, the bazaar is like any other in Pakistan, full of food stalls, small shops selling musical instruments and khussa, a traditional hand-crafted footwear, but at night, brothels located above the shops open for business.

In the past, Heera Mandi was a place “that trained courtesans who won the hearts of emperors”. These courtesans were known as tawaif, professional women who were taught to sing and dance, but times have changed. The women say that things were different back then, that women like them were respected. “They were artists, not gandi kanjri - not dirty prostitutes.”

The tawaif is similar to Japan’s geisha. They were women who were trained to sing and dance or recite poetry. Their main purpose was to entertain the nobility. Once the British annexed the area, the tawaif’s services declined and they made ends meet by selling their bodies, often serving the British military and thus they were defamed and branded as prostitutes.

We are witness to the life in the Heera Mandi as seen through the eyes of Brown. She introduces us to Maha and her family. A lady in her mid-thirties with five young children. Maha was sold as a bride at the age of twelve. She was a successful dancer in her twenties but after becoming the second wife of a man and having many babies, she has become plump and no longer dances for a living. Her meager existence with her children is poorly supported by her husband Adnon, who comes to Heera Mandi, only to smoke his opium in peace away from his “proper” family, meaning his first wife.

For the next four years, Brown shares the story of Maha’s family. It is very heart-wrenching and sad but is also a grim reality that there are more families such as Maha’s. Women who are born into this life and cannot escape it. The nighttime world of Heera Mandi which Brown describes is very difficult to imagine. In Heera Mandi, we are also introduced to khusras, transgenders who live on the fringe of society. We are taught words in Urdu and Punjabi that are frequently used in the business such as dalal, which translates to promoters, agents, or simply - pimps. We learn the slang for men and women’s private parts, and derogatory terms for prostitutes such as taxi and kanjri.

Brown does admit to feeling a bit of guilt sharing the story of Maha and her children as she is also a mother with children of her own who are about the same age as Maha’s. She tells us while her fourteen year old daughters in her middle class life in Britain go to school and to the cinema, Maha’s daughters “dance for men and have their virginity purchased by the highest bidder.” 

The Dancing Girls will make you laugh and cry and at times will make you angry. The abuse these women endure is unimaginable. What’s even more unimaginable is the vicious cycle in which the mother becomes her own children’s agent soliciting sex with them to potential customers. A tragedy whose story needs to be read by everyone. ~Ernie Hoyt

Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language by Katherine Russell Rich (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

“India will change you forever,” a friend once told Katherine Russell Rich and after recovering from cancer and losing her job, that change was just what Russell wanted. “I no longer had the language to describe my own life,” she explains. “So I decided to borrow someone else’s.” She decides to study Hindi for a year in Rajasthan.

Adult language learning isn’t for the fainthearted. The optimum period for language acquisition begins at eighteen months and peaks at seven. The ability to pick up vocabulary lasts forever but learning intonation and sound patterns becomes progressively harder with age. However Russell is intrigued by the idea that speaking another language opens up another world, wondering if learning Hindi will double the size of the world she was born into.

What she discovers is her new world expands with its new language and her old one begins to vanish. While she learns words that have no equivalent in English, vocabulary she’s used all of her life fades into the back of her mind. “Hindi pollutes my English,” as she absorbs the formal address of her new language and transfers new rules of pronunciation into her native language where they don’t belong. She begins to say “we” instead of “I,” as Hindi blurs the distinction between the individual and the group for her. Even her face begins to change. When she looks in a mirror, she judges her features by the standards that exist in her new culture, described by her new language. She learns that in Hindi yesterday and tomorrow are the same word, that Indian time is circular, not linear. “in India, in Hindi, it’s always right now.”

Russell practices total immersion, living in “the incurably medieval” city of Udaipur with an extended family who ensure that she’s surrounded by Hindi, “a monsoon of words.” She takes long walks alone, looking at unfamiliar sights that she has no names for. Without language, she falls back into the wonder of childhood, where nothing appears ordinary.

Then on a bright day in September, the world shakes when the Twin Towers fall. Language becomes political with words like “terrorism,” “fanaticism,” “war.” The deep and murderous divide between Indian Hindus and Muslims becomes horribly evident to Russell. She learns that Hindi is seen by many as a right-wing nationalistic tool, intended to supplant the nation’s eighteen official languages and to remove all lingering traces of Persian words that came with the former Mughal rulers.

Linking Muslims and Christians as undesirable foreign outsiders, right-wing Hindu terrorists attack and kill an Australian doctor and his two sons because they believe the man has been proselytizing. Russell is attacked three times in public, punched and knocked down. Her host family, one of her teachers tells her, has been spreading rumors about her and, unnerved, she thinks this is true. She leaves the house that’s been her refuge, moves to a hotel, and becomes “lost in India.”

Four hours from Udaipur, Hindu pilgrims burn to death in a train car conflagration. “Muslims had done this thing” is the popular verdict, reinforced by nationalist leaders, and Muslims are killed with impunity as a result. The official death toll is nine hundred. Russell’s friendships are shaken when she hears people she’s close to spew hatred against Muslims. When her year is up, India and Pakistan are “teetering on the edge.” And yet India becomes part of her, her second world, along with her imperfect but passionate grasp on Hindi.

Dreaming in Hindi is more than a memoir. It’s a deep and piercing examination of what’s gained and what’s lost by submitting to another language, another culture. ~Janet Brown

Silence by Shusaku Endo (Kodansha)

After reading Donald Keene’s autobiography, I was moved by his love of classical Japanese literature and was inspired to read another book by a well known Japanese literary author. In the past, my Japanese mother strongly suggested that I read works by Yukio Mishima and Natsume Soseki. She looked down on my love of science-fiction and fantasy. I reluctantly read books by both authors, Yukio Mishima’s “The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea” and Natsume Soseki’s “Botchan”, mostly to please my mother. Now, I wanted to read some classic Japanese literature by choice but which author’s books should I choose? 

I decided on Silence by Shusaku Endo for a couple of reasons. The first reason is simple. I had seen the movie adaptation of the novel and thought it was a great story. The second is the subject matter which centers around a relatively unknown group of people - the Japanese Christians. Endo presents a conflict between East and West, “especially in its relationship to Christianity.” Endo is quoted as saying, “Christianity must adapt itself radically if it is to take root in the ‘swamp’ of Japan.”

The story is set during a time when Christianity is banned and people who are caught practicing the religion are executed by burning. However, the burnings didn’t produce the desired effect as the condemned became martyrs in the eyes of other believers. The Shogunate realizes this and changes their tactics where death is  “preceded by torture in a tremendous effort to make the martyrs apostatize.” 

News had reached the Church in Rome, “Christovao Ferraira, sent to Japan sent to Japan by the Society of Jesus in Portugal, after undergoing the torture of ‘the pit’ at Nagasaki has apostatized.” Three fathers in the Society of Jesus, Sebastian Rodrigues, Francis Garrpe and Juan de Santa Marta, are currently working in the Dutch colony of Macao. After hearing about the situation in Japan, they are desperate to reach the shores of Japan even though Japan has cut all ties with Portugal. 

Rodrigues writes in a letter and relates Juan de Santa Marta’s words who says, “In that stricken land the Christians have lost their priests and are like a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Some one must go to give them courage and to ensure that the tiny flame of faith does not die out.” He also says, it is their duty to seek out their teacher, Father Ferraira, to find out the truth. Did Ferreira really apostatize or was it a lie spread by the Dutch and the English.

The Head Priest in Macao gave permission to Rodrigues and Gaarpe on the condition that they leave Juan de Santa Marta in Macao who was showing signs of catching malaria. In Macao the two Fathers meet their first Japanese, a twenty-nine or thirty-year old, unshaven and drunk man named Kichijiro. 

Two priests accompanied by a Japanese man named Kichijiro manage to reach the shores of Japan during the night so as not to be spotted. Gaarpe does not trust Kichijiro as he would not answer the simple question, “Are you a Christian?”  Father Rodrigues gives Kichijiro the benefit of the doubt and is pleased that Kichijiro has found some hidden Christians. Word spreads quickly and other Christians in hiding come to see the priests. Unfortunately, it isn’t only the Christians that have heard the news that there are foreign Fathers on Japanese soil. The news has reached the local government officials as well. 

Once the searching commences, the two Fathers are separated. Father Rodrigues cannot go back to his original hiding place and wanders the land with Kichijiro as his guide. Father Rodrigues is then betrayed by Kichijiro and is captured. However, the local daimyo doesn’t order Father Rodrigues’s execution but plays psychological games with him to convince the Father to apostatize in front of the other captured Christians. 

The Silence of the title is Father Rodgrigues’s question to God. Why does He remain silent as Christians are persecuted, tortured and killed? However,  the real question is, will Father Rodrigues apostatize to save the suffering of other Christians or will he defend his faith until his own end? ~Ernie Hoyt

Chronicles of My Life : An American in the Heart of Japan by Donald Keene (Columbia University Press)

To long-term expat residents of Japan, the name Donald Keene is synonymous with “Japan expert”. He is an American who found a deep love for Asia and Japan in particular and is also  a Professor Emeritus of Columbia University where he taught Japanese Literature. He has written extensively about Japanese literature and culture and has translated a number of Japanese classics into English. A man who was friends with the Japanese literary luminaries such as Yukio Mishima, Kobo Abe, and Yasunari Kawabata. Unfortunately, he passed away in February of this year. It only seemed appropriate to read his autobiography as my personal tribute to him.

Chronicles of My Life is his autobiography where Keene shares how his love of Asia and Japan got began .I had assumed that he was a permanent resident of Japan long before I became one myself but found to my surprise that he only became a resident in 2011 after the Tohoku Earthquake and after his retirement from Columbia University. 

I was even more surprised when Keene admits that during his childhood, “The word kimono (however I pronounced it) was probably the only word of Japanese I knew.”  He mentions that he was familiar with kanji characters, thanks to his collection of postage stamps. But he goes on to say, “I never saw a Japanese film, never listened to a Japanese piece of music, never heard a word of Japanese spoken.” He didn’t meet his first Japanese until he was in junior high school. 

Keene excelled in his academic studies and was accepted at Columbia University when he was only sixteen. He meets his first Chinese in his humanities class and became good friends. However, Lee was studying to be an engineer, literature did not hold as much interest to Lee as it did to Keene. Keene comes up with the brilliant idea of having Lee teach him Chinese and starts practicing the art of calligraphy. During Keene’s college days, he used to frequent a book shop that specializes in remainders and found “The Tale of Genji” by Murasaki Shibibu for forty-nine cents. It’s this story that opened his path to Japanese literature. 

On December 7, 1942, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Keene’s professor of the history of Japanese thought was interned as an enemy alien. Keene realizes that he would probably have to join the military but had learned of the Navy’s Japanese language school whose main purpose was to train men to be interpreters and translators. Thus, Keene was able to continue his Japanese studies in the navy.

After being discharged from the army, Keene returns to Columbia University to continue his studies in Japanese where he worked on his Master’s Thesis and Doctoral Dissertation. He also studied for a year at Harvard University before transferring to Cambridge University where he received his second Master’s Degree. His hopes of studying in Japan was not possible because it was the time of the Occupation and the only non-military people who were allowed into the country were businessmen and missionaries.

Keene fulfills his wish of going back to Japan by receiving a fellowship from a foundation to study at Kyoto University. During his stay in Kyoto, Keene writes his first articles and reviews in Japanese for academic and literary magazine.

This is a fascinating story of one man’s love affair with Japan written in a style that is entertaining and easy to understand. Keene’s quest to gain a better understanding of Japan’s literary history is so enchanting you may feel the urge to visit your local bookstore or library and starting reading Japanese literature on your own. ~Ernie Hoyt