I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai (Back Bay Books)

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“One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world.” These are the words spoken by a young Pashtun woman who was born and grew up in the Swat Valley of northwestern Pakistan, near the Afghan border. She is famously known as “The Girl Who was Shot by the Taliban”. What was her crime? She was shot for going to school! I Am Malala is her story. 

On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, Malala’s school van was stopped by two men. One of the men got up on the railboard and asked, “Who is Malala?”. Nobody answered but many of the other girls looked at her. Malala was the only one who didn’t cover her face. Then, the man lifted a gun and shot three times. One bullet went through Malala’s eye socket, the other two bullets hit the girls sitting next to Malala, one in the hand and the other in the left shoulder. The next time Malala would wake up, she would be in a hospital. 

I Am Malala is an autobiography of Malala Yousafzai, the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. She advocates the rights of all children to an education. She was the co-recipient of the prize in 2014 with Kalish Satyarthi, another children’s rights activist from India. 

Malala takes us to the beginning, before the Taliban. She starts off her story by saying, “When I was born, people in our village commiserated with my mother and nobody congratulated my father.” We, as Westerners, would celebrate the birth of any child, boy or girl but Malala was born “in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children.”. 

Fortunately for Malala, her father was an advocate for education and also ran a chain of schools. He encouraged his daughter to go to school and study. Malala was inspired by her father and strived to do her best. Then in 2009, the Taliban came to the Swat Valley. Girls were told not to go to school, however, Malala was determined to get an education. She told one of her friends, “The Taliban have never come for a small girl.” Little did she know how much her life would change when they did.

It’s been said that, “Money is the root of all evil”. I would substitute money with organized religion. Christianity had its Crusades. The partition of British India led to violence between Hindus and Muslims. Even Islam had their wars between Shia and Sunni, and currently, the Taliban’s misinterpretation of the Quran pits Islam against the world.

Malala’s story is a powerful story but it is not just her story. It is about the thousands, maybe millions of girls who also want to get educated and live a better life. Malala will inspire you and will enforce the truth about “the pen is mightier than the sword”. Malala’s words are far reaching and more powerful than the lone Taliban and his cowardly act of shooting an innocent girl. Malala inspires us to speak out against the injustices of the world. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun, translated by Lizzie Buehler (Counterpoint)

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“News of the deaths moved fast that week,” but soon fatalities from another calamity spawned by the natural will supplant this current crop of corpses. Volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes--”Disaster lay dormant, in every corner,” and a travel agency called Jungle has learned how to profit from that universal truth. As soon as destruction arrives, be it fire, flood, or some other natural horror, Jungle puts together a travel package to that area and disaster tourists, prompted by a voyeuristic altruism, sign up to witness other people’s suffering.

Yona, young and pretty, has spent ten years working for Jungle. Suddenly her manager threatens her job security by making persistent sexual advances and Yona eagerly takes an opportunity to escape his unwanted attentions. 

She’s sent to Mui, a small country off the coast of Vietnam. For years it has profited from a desert sinkhole that once swallowed up a substantial number of its residents. Unsure that Mui is still pulling its weight as a disaster destination, Jungle wants Yona to evaluate its profitability.

Through a series of comic travel misadventures, Yona finds herself stranded in this country and is drawn into a local plot to capitalize upon its flagging natural disaster. The ground near the original sinkhole is deliberately being weakened by an ambitious building project. A long series of oddly coincidental traffic accidents involving construction trucks and pedestrians provide a generous number of dead bodies that, Yona is told, will be the only “victims'' of the revived and expanded sinkhole. This new horror, which is being carefully scripted by an imported screenwriter, will revive Mui’s flagging disaster tourism and enrich the country’s leading citizens. 

But Yona falls in love with the man who’s been hired as her guide and he shows her life among the less privileged citizens, scorned by the more fortunate as “crocodiles.” When by chance she reads a finished copy of the script, she realizes the true horror of the scheme she’s been part of and puts herself among the threatened population of “crocodiles.” Then nature intervenes…

Beginning as a comic satire, The Disaster Tourist skillfully expands into a thriller, a horror story, and finally a threatening fable for our time that strikes hard and deep. Seoul novelist Yun Ko-eun says in her afterword, “Sometimes I imagine scenes so euphoric that they grow absurd.” While her invention of Jungle is far from euphoric, except for those reaping its financial success, the absurdities come quickly: the ill-fated use of a train’s toilet at the wrong time, the loss of a passport (every traveler’s nightmare), the fortuitous events that bring Yona back to Mui and into a job she thinks will be her way out of a difficult situation at Jungle. Then the tension begins to ratchet up and when disaster strikes, it holds both tragedy and a strange salvation.

Winner of three Korean literary awards and author of previous novels and short story collections, Yun Ko-eun sees the publication of her first English-translated novel as being “a constellation of coincidences,” that came into being because her translator and her writing “exchanged cosmic winks with one another.” Here’s hoping for many more of those winks to take place--hers is a voice we need to hear at this point in our history.~Janet Brown



Drunk in China by Derek Sandhaus (Potomac Books)

After swallowing his first sip of baijiu in his introductory days as an American expat in China, Derek Sandhaus finds himself choking, gasping, worrying about potential blindness and brain damage, while threatening  to  “consult a war crimes tribunal.”  But baijiu is an integral part of Chinese business, social, and political life. Sandhaus quickly learns he won’t achieve any sort of success in his new country  without learning how to stomach its most popular variety of liquor. 

Baiju is an acquired taste that at first presents challenges to the most seasoned drinker; Chinese friends tell Sandhaus he’ll have to drink at least three hundred glasses before he’ll begin to enjoy the experience. A quick learner, he rapidly achieves that pinnacle after a mere seventy tipples. Soon his newly acquired affinity leads him to explore the culture and history of baijiu in a rollicking, hard-drinking odyssey that takes him across China .

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Nine thousand years ago, Neolithic Chinese created “the world’s oldest alcoholic beverage,”  a rice-based form of homebrewed beer that rapidly became a household staple. With the Qin empire came grain alcohol  which the Emperor wisely decided to tax, thereby providing a hefty source of government revenue. Under his encouragement, a more sophisticated form of alcohol production and consumption spread across China. 

Later, influenced by Mongolia’s fermented mare’s milk, distilled grain alcohol began production in China and drinking baijiu, cheap, strong, and made from sorghum, became the national pastime. Today it accounts for roughly 90% of China’s liquor sales and is the bestseller among all the world’s liquors. Almost 3.4 billion gallons are produced annually, with their strengths ranging from 52 to 140 proof.

Until recently baijiu figured heavily in corruption scandals. “The Chinese government’s annual liquor tab for lavish banquets reached 600 billion yuan ($94.5 billion USD),” in 2011, “roughly three times that year’s stated national defense budget.” On a lower level, bribes were sweetened with bottles of baiju that could cost up to $200 USD. When Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign began, baijiu sales plummeted.  

Globalization has also taken its toll on baijiu’s popularity. Foreign liquors have become fashionable with the affluent new generation in China, especially among the young women who have broken tradition by having a drink themselves and who, perhaps wisely, have turned away from the incendiary properties of baijiu. Hoping new markets will restore their booming and profitable sales of the recent past, baiju manufacturers are going international, with the target of conquering elegant bars around the world. 

To assist with that goal, Sandhaus has cofounded a new baiju label, Ming River Sichuan Baijiu, that’s been distilled with Western palates in mind, edits DrinkBaijiu.com, and has sprinkled enticing recipes for homemade baijiu cocktails throughout the pages of  Drunk in China. 

Who knows? Sake and mezcal have risen from obscurity to become staples in almost every bar on the planet. Why can’t baijiu achieve that same popularity among the trendy--and intrepid--drinkers of the world? ~Janet Brown






 


 











 

 










 







































Phra Farang : An English Monk in Thailand by Phra Peter Pannapadipo (Arrow Books)

There comes a point in time in many people’s lives when they begin to question their own values and direction. Perhaps they feel a need to buy an expensive sports car or need to change professions. Perhaps they will give up everything they own and live as an ascetic. Some may call this a mid-life crisis. Others may call it a spiritual awakening. Whatever it is, it is a time when a person makes a decision that can change his or her life. 

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Peter Robinson reached this point in his life. He was a successful businessman living in comfort in London. He had a nice house, fancy clothes, and had enough disposable income to indulge himself in various pursuits. Peter says, “Sometimes I used my money wisely, occasionally generously, usually wastefully, to help me try to achieve happiness, or at least the ultimate ‘good time’” He never found it.

Phra Farang is Peter’s journey of leaving the world he knows behind. Once he is ordained, he is known as Phra Peter Pannapadipo. Phra Peter shares his story of the ten years he spent as monk meditating in various monasteries in Thailand and tells of his trials and tribulations of trying to follow the teachings of the Buddha. 

Phra Peter says his most often asked question is, “Why did you become a Buddhist monk?”. He thinks “they expect my answer to reveal some personal inadequacy or character flaw, a dreadful tragedy in my past, or some other dark secrets.”  None of the reasons cited influenced Phra Peter in choosing his path. He says, “If that had been the case, I’d have joined the Foreign Legion.” 

The catalyst in setting Phra Peter on his path to becoming a Buddhist priest was the death of his older brother. His brother David was only two years older but was the embodiment of success. He had a lot of money and knew how to enjoy it. He lived in Paris, had a chateau in the countryside, a Ferrari, a yacht...and yet, he was dead at forty-two. 

Around the same time as his brother’s death, Peter had made his first trip to Thailand. He was not interested in the beaches or the nightlife but checked out as many monasteries as he could, even the ones that were in little out-of-the-way places. He was impressed with the calmness and tranquility and the sense of purpose at the monasteries that he was determined to learn more. 

Thus begins the transformation of Peter Robinson to Phra Peter Pannadapido. The Thai embassy put Peter in touch with a monastery in London called Wat Buddhapadipa. In a short time, Peter would make the first of hundreds of visits to the temple to study and would continue his studies in Thailand. 

Phra Peter Pannapadipo shows great courage in giving up his comfortable life to ordain as a Buddhist monk. He knows he’s often seen as a novelty to the eyes of many Thais who call him Phra Farang, farang being the Thai word for “foreigner”. His friends and family don’t understand him but that doesn’t stop him from practicing what he believes to be right. The path of monkhood might not be for everybody but it was the right choice for Peter and he may inspire you to find your own spiritual awakening. ~Ernie Hoyt

Border Town by Hillel Wright (Printed Matter Press)

The popularity of Japanese animation has grown exponentially since the time of Speed Racer and Marine Boy. Thanks to movies released by Studio Ghibli and directors Hayao Miyazaki, Makoto Shinkai, and Mamoru Hosada, the movies have not only helped the animation industry but the manga industry as well. Hillel Wright uses manga as a backdrop to his story which focuses on the life and loves of the fictional manga artist.

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Border Town revolves around the wife of a character only referred to as the Old Man who is currently in his fifties. Ten years ago he married a Japanese woman twenty years his junior. The couple met while the woman was studying massage therapy in Seattle. Together, they moved to Japan where they have been living for the last twenty years. They have a young son named Ichiro who is now seven-years old. 

The Old Man’s wife is Fumie Akahoshi. She worked as a massage therapist in a small clinic in Shin Maruko, a small town in Kanagawa Prefecture located along the bank of the Tamagawa River. Although she was making a decent living, her real passion was art. She was happiest when she was drawing. 

Fumie becomes a famous manga artist after creating her masterpiece Chibi Hanako-chan. She started the manga as “her own private satirical war against the abuses of public trust perpetuated by charlatans in the ‘massage” business when a young masseuse, increasingly forced into more and more explicitly sexual acts at work, takes over the business from her quack of a boss, who she turns into her sex-slave and object of constant humiliation”. 

Fumie feels there are only so many corrupt massage parlors she can write about and has her character Chibi Hanako-chan evolve into “a kind of free-lance Erin Brokovich”. Her books shows Hana Chibiko-chan “taking on a panoply of Japanese social types - corrupt politicians, subway rush-hour gropers and grabbers, crooked business executives, doping athlete heroes, militarist goons, gay male fashion czars” and more. 

Fumie becomes even more famous than her husband who had gained fame by creating and writing a series titled We’re No Angels which he based on the Five Book of Moses. Fumie’s manga is adapted into an anime series and a full-length feature film, and later Chibi Hanako-chan becomes a video game character. 

The book that finally gets her in trouble is when she satirizes the entire Imperial family including the Emperor himself. The story angers many right wing militants who hire a yakuza assassin to terminate her. We follow Fumie as she stays one step ahead of the assassins and finds more romance abroad even though her life is in danger.  

Border Town has all the elements of a love story gone amok. Wright writes with a rye sense of humor. His story is full of craziness and absurdity with a good dose of realism to keep you interested in how all the characters are interrelated. If you love Japanese manga, have a twisted sense of humor and enjoy books by Tom Robbins or Thomas Pynchon, Border Town will be right up your alley. ~Ernie Hoyt

Ship of Fates by Caitlin Chung (Lanternfish Press)

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“There once was a girl whose name was etched into the water so that she might never feel lost.” Who is this girl? Is it the one who fled China, riding the back of a whale that had a fortune in gold within its belly? Is it Mei, small and Chinese in the white city of San Francisco who persuades the owner of a gambling hell to hire her as a card dealer and who has a secret game going of her own? Is it Madame Toy, an entrepreneur in the flesh trade, with her “intrusive face, contradictory to her beauty”? Is it Annie, the girl who has just arrived from China, bearing the good luck that comes from having an eleventh toe, who loses all good fortune when she falls in love with a man who has only nine toes on his feet? Is it Annie and Jack’s daughter, Juniper, whom Mei sees as an escape from the curse she is bound by? Or is it the Lighthouse Keeper, enigmatic and solitary, who embodies all of the stories and none of the answers?

Caitlin Chung, in her slender debut novel, carries the strength and beauty of Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales all the way through Ship of Fates. Underpinned by the history of the California Gold Rush, Chung’s story weaves through and beyond that reality, bearing echoes of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, with a poetic command of language that gives this novel a kinship with Steinbeck’s The Pearl. In common with its mythic premise of purloined Chinese gold being flung into the waters of California, the story has the beauty and mystery of a soap bubble, floating in brightness before it vanishes. 

It’s Chung’s poetry that makes her book soar, with her sense of magic realism giving it an irresistible luster.  Readers may have to go back to it more than once before grasping the intricacy of its plot but when caught in the web of language, they are certain to happily suspend any disbelief. Watching Jack and Annie disappear as Juniper takes on her full beauty is an image any parent will understand. Everyone will recognize the truth of “A fate is made of water, made to fit itself into the last spaces left open in a life.” And slowly all of the world is facing “a happy ending turned sad, an enchantment turned into a curse.”

In this time of disease and political turmoil, more than ever we need fables and poetry to soften the harshness of what we face every day. Caitlin Chung, in a little over one hundred pages, has given us exactly what we need. And as she works this magic, she celebrates the history and the beauty of the San Francisco Bay Area, rescuing it from the depredations of tech development that have intensified extremes of wealth and poverty, to reveal a city of lapidary beauty surrounded by the magnificence of the natural world,  its “bay opened and fanned out like a deck of cards...with nothing but the lazy flight of gulls to pass the time.”~Janet Brown


Block Chain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang (FSG Originals X Logic)

“Famine has its own vocabulary, a hungry language that haunts and lingers,” Xiaowei Wang says, and a generous portion of China’s population had mastered that vocabulary, both before and after the birth of the People’s Republic. Seventy-one years later food is abundant but China’s food safety index is below that of Mexico or Turkey. “Feeding 22% of the world’s population on 7% of the world’s arable land is just plain difficult.” 

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“Food safety is crucial for political stability,” a problem matched by the truth that 40% of China’s population (and 8% of the world’s population) lives in rural agrarian areas where farmers tend plots of land that are “smaller than two football fields.” Young people flock to the cities for better jobs, where their wages are eaten up by the higher cost of urban living. They replicate the conditions they came from in “urban villages,” pockets of squalor within the borders of glittering metropolises; the disparity between their lives and of their families at home when compared to urban residents is jarring and a potential political threat.  

China has found a solution to both of these problems by using high-tech solutions. Wang, while traveling through the countryside, discovers that although villagers may not have indoor plumbing, they receive 4G and 5G cellular service. Through their mobile phones, they’re connected to Taobao.com, an e-commerce site with a user base that’s double that of Amazon’s, with 600 million active users every month. Owned by the tech giant, Alibaba, Taobao connects villagers with consumers, provides delivery of their products, collects and disburses payments, and has made cash obsolete. Even for small transactions, payments are made through AliPay and WeChat (owned by Alibaba’s rival Tencent), over the phone. 

Through e-commerce, communities of subsistence farmers have become Taobao villages, selling everything from eggs to Halloween costumes over the internet to customers all over the world through AliExpress. Youths who migrated to cities are returning home; if they need capital to launch their online business, they can borrow money through Alipay.

It is, Wang says, “as if Amazon decided it suddenly wanted to offer assistance to an Appalachian coal-mining town by helping its citizens start candy businesses and offering them Amazon-backed loans.”

To combat China’s second political threat, safe food is available for those who can afford it. For $40 apiece, free-range, vegetable-fed, three-month-old butchered chickens with an ankle bracelet attached to one leg are delivered to affluent residences . A scan of a QR code on  the bracelet brings up the records of that chicken’s provenance, life, and stages of its shipment, from a livestream of its time in the farmyard to the results of the test it was given every two weeks, to how it was handled on its journey. Each of these records is linked to the previous one in a system that will reject any falsification that deviates from the required norm. It’s a block chain that takes the burden of trust from human beings and puts it into the code behind the chain--and Wang points out, into the coders who wrote it. The farmer who raised this expensive chicken grosses only about 14 dollars per bird but he has sold 6000 chickens, Wang assures readers.

Pork is an integral part of the Chinese diet and “China is the only country in the world to have a pork reserve,” similar to the wheat reserves in the US. Chinese pork is used in Western products--”from bloodclotting heparin to the protein powders in our smoothies.” In 2013 China’s WH Group bought Smithfield, legendary producer of American ham and expanded it into a mammoth collection of industrial pig farms that pose environmental problems to their neighbors.

In 2018 African swine fever hit China, killing pigs and prompting fears of a nation-wide pork riot. ASF arrived, it was determined, through human error. “Human farmers are inefficient in an optimized world,” so Alibaba turned to AI as a solution with the ultimate goal of replacing pig farmers and “the clumsy irrationality of meat machines” with bodies that are powered by artificial intelligence. 

Science fiction? No, Wang posits, a science future, in which humans may well be given a monthly stipend in order to fulfill their role--to buy things made by automated beings and enrich those who own it all, including the consumers.

Shenzhen native Naomi Wu calls herself the “Sexy Cyborg,” born human but “with cyborg body modifications, including breast implants that light up when she dons a special corset she’s designed and built.” A professional coder, an Instagram star, and a DIY maker at Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, Wu’s ambition is to have a shop where 3D printers will produce body parts on demand for women who want to change their human form--an extension of what exists now as plastic surgery.

Early in this book Wang meets a farmer who claims that the future is a human construct, that we exist only in the present and in the work we do there every day. At the conclusion, Wang finds a similar school of thought in Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, in which he calls for a liberation from “living for imagined futures.” Instead we should live for “a sense of purpose, a sense of being needed.” “Without a future, I must give myself over to the present,” Wang realizes.

After wandering through what could be the future of the world as it exists in present-day China, Wang concludes with “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning.” It’s a message that grounds and reassures readers who may feel dizzy with the infinite possibilities and the nagging sense of terror that gleam through the vision presented by Block Chain Chicken Farm. ~Janet Brown

A longer review of this book can be read at www.asiabythebook.com/voa/2021/1/6/a-primer-to-the-future

The Heaven Stone by David Daniel (St. Martin's Press)

The Heaven Stone by David Daniel won the 1993 St. Martin’s Press / PWA Best First Private Eye Novel contest. Set in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, it is the first in a series featuring ex-cop turned private eye Alex Rasmussen. During the time of the Cambodian genocide, Lowell accepted an influx of Cambodian refugees and currently boasts one of the largest Cambodian-American communities in the nation, second only to Long Beach, California. 

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Bhuntan Tran, one of the refugees from Cambodia, was found ded in his own home. The local police believe it’s an open and shut case of a drug deal gone wrong as they found some cocaine at Tran’s house. However, Ada Stewart, a Chinese-American social worker, has doubts about the official report. She works with the refugee community and knows that Tran was holding down two jobs and had recently moved into his new house. She believes Tran was a model citizen and cannot accept that Tran was involved in anything illegal. She hires Rasmussen to further investigate the cause of Tran’s death.

Rasmussen had worked on the force for eight years before an unfortunate incident found him on the outs with internal affairs. This led him to resigning from the force and becoming a private eye. Thankfully, he still has friends on the force who sometimes give him a helping hand. 

Ramussen’s former colleague and friend told him the killing was done execution-style and may have been a professional hit with two shots to the back of the head at point blank range. This information makes Rasmussen uneasy. “Nothing takes heat off a killing—and therefore the police—like calling it gangland.” “Folks figure, Hey, play with fire you get burnt, victim probably got his due.” 

Tran was the only one of his family to survive the “Killing Fields'' of Cambodia. It was with the help of a non-governmental organization Tran was given the chance to leave the refugee camp in Thailand and start a new life in the U.S. Tran’s neighbors and employers said he was a hard-working, law-abiding citizen; they did not believe he was involved with drugs.

The deeper Rasmussen digs into the case, the less likely he is inclined to believe in the official police report. He also discovers that many Cambodians had hidden their family treasures and often used them to cut through the red tape and make their way to the land of opportunity. This is a story of the American Dream becoming an American Nightmare. 

David Daniel is a fresh voice in the hard-boiled mystery genre. His story will appeal to fans of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett as Alex Rasmussen joins the ranks of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. The story Rasmussen narrates keeps you guessing throughout as you try to determine who the killer is and what his motives were. And what exactly is the “heaven stone”? How does the “heaven stone” relate to the Cambodian community? You will be inclined to return to Lowell, Massachusetts by the time you are done reading. ~Ernie Hoyt