Fong and the Indians by Paul Theroux (Penguin)

Paul Theroux is mostly known for his travel essays but he has also written a number of novels. Fong and the Indians is a story he wrote shortly after meeting a glum Chinese gentleman in Kampala, Uganda. When he started the novel, he had been living in East Africa for about four years. At first, what he wrote about the place was “apologetic and sorrowful, or else very angry”. Writing fiction about Africa gave him another perspective. “Africa was, briefly, a comedy”.

Sam Fong, a Chinese immigrant who has been living in East Africa for thirty-five years is the owner of a small grocery store. “They called him an immigrant; actually he had lived in Africa longer than the Prime Minister, who was an African. But to be one Chinaman in a country of seven million Africans is not easy: you stand out; the East cannot save you, you remain a visible immigrant all your born days and so do your children, and so do theirs.”

Sam Fong wasn’t always a grocer. He was a carpenter who worked at the Ministry of Works when East Africa was still a British Protectorate. . He became a grocer out of necessity after the country gained independence. One day an Englishman came and asked Sam Fong to point out “someone terribly keen”. The Englishman insisted on a native, an African. 

The following day, the Englishman returned and handed an envelope to the “keen African” worker, Mohinder Singh. The African was sent to England. When he came back six-months later, he was appointed foreman and became Sam Fong’s boss. The African became like his white bosses, calling his countrymen baboons and useless natives and telling Sam Fong that he could sack him anytime. Sam Fong left the Ministry of Works that day and made three resolutions - “Never trust a white”, “never trust a black”, “never be a carpenter”. 

On his way home, Sam Fong spotted a sign reading “Store for Hire”. Fong signs a ten year lease with the owner, an Ismaili from India named Hassanali Fakhru. What Fong didn’t realize was that in his contract was a clause that stated, “And I promise to buy all stocks and stores and goods from the above-named Hassanali Fakhru at prices to be agreed upon so help me God.”

Sam Fong just wants to be left in peace but aside from being swindled by Fakhru, he is faced with a couple of hardline communists from his home country, a couple of Americans who only want to be his “frin”, and continues to be used and abused by the actual owner of the shop, namely Fakhru.

As Theroux has spent time in Africa, his satire is quite funny at times but I’m not sure how it will appeal to today’s readers as he describes the native Africans as crooks and being simple-minded. The Asians, mostly of Indian descent, as cunning scoundrels, and the Chinese, well mostly Fong, as simple-minded and clueless. 

The book was originally published in 1968 and I don’t know if it’s the sign of the times or not, but I failed to see the humor in Theroux’s description of Fong taking out his frustrations by beating his wife and having her accept it as part of her duty. In the first three chapters alone, Fong beats his wife for such minor offenses as writing a sign for the grocery store where he works. 

The story may be a bit dated but it’s still quite enjoyable. Just remember, don’t apply today’s standards for a story that was written in the late sixties about an African nation becoming independent from British colonialism. It is satire and is meant to be fun or perhaps it was a bit of commentary on life in Africa during those times. ~Ernie Hoyt

Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia edited by Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas (University of California Press)

Curry has become such an international dish that it’s hard to remember it originated in India. Yet when people think of Indian cuisine, this is the first menu choice that usually comes to mind. How did this dish become both the culinary symbol of a country and a popular meal across the globe? Japan, Thailand, Great Britain, the United States all have their own version of curry—Campbell’s Mushroom Soup with a dash of curry powder, anyone?

In Curried Cultures, a group of academic writers look at the history, proliferation, and perhaps the decline of curry, in a series of essays that painstakingly comb through every detail of the dish. 

When the princely states of the Subcontinent became Great Britain’s Jewel in the Crown, culinary matters sharply divided the colonized from the conquerors. The British occupiers, believing that the local diet led to weakness and poor health, clung fiercely to their slabs of animal flesh washed down with beer. The people of the Subcontinent prided themselves on vegetable dishes that were spiced with a sophisticated flavor that had yet to reach the West. Each side shuddered at the barbarity of the other; it took the common soldiery of England to find a meeting ground with their subcontinental counterparts through meals of curry. Although canteen cooks probably adopted curry because of its ease and economy, the dish became popular with British troops and traveled with them to Japan and other corners of the world.

Today in Great Britain curry shops are as numerous as fish and chip stands. “Going out for a curry” is a popular way to end a night of serious drinking. In the U.S., fast food curry houses are spreading across the country, becoming almost as ubiquitous as Chinese or Thai restaurants—and equally Americanized. The Indian princes of the Raj would be horrified by what America calls curry and most citizens of modern-day India would find it inedible.

Even within India, the concept of curry is changing fast. Traditional curry dishes take time and attention which is difficult to find in a high-tech, high-speed world. Even the least sophisticated curries, the ones found in the roadside hostelries called Udupi hotels, have changed in the drive for efficiency. In India and abroad, supermarket shelves are filled with small, flat, red and white boxes that are sold under the MTR label. They contain a foil envelope filled with curry that’s quickly reheated in boiling water.

These ready-to-eat meals are cheap, flavorful, and based upon an ancient culinary tradition. In a temple in southern India, five thousand pilgrims are fed daily with fifty different selections, including curry. Legend has it that this is where the famous Mavalli Tiffin Rooms (MTR) garnered their recipes, giving their restaurant customers silver utensils with which to eat the adopted temple curries. Nowadays a version of that food can be ordered online or bought in overseas grocery stores; boxes of MTR meals feed foreign consumers who have no idea of the history behind the packaging, as well as families in India who demand flavor as much as convenience in their fast food.

Although it’s an interesting look at the way global popularity changes traditional food, Curried Cultures suffers from this kind of sentence: “I think studies of immigration demand a dose of corporeality.” Readers who hack their way through the jungles of jargon will find a lively history waiting for them—and probably a strong yearning for a plate of curry.

The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu by Dan Jurafsky (W.W. Norton & Company)

Even the least adventurous American eater owes a big debt of gratitude to China. Dan Jurafsky’s research shows that, if it weren’t for the Chinese, bottles of ketchup might never have gained dominance in U.S. kitchens. 

When Jurafsky’s daughter pointed out that “tomato ketchup” was redundant because that was the only kind of ketchup in existence, her father began delving into the origins of this omnipresent condiment. A Hong Kong friend provided the answer--”ketchup” is a word that comes in direct translation from Cantonese--ke means tomato and tchup is sauce. The mystery then became how did ketchup gain a Cantonese name?

The answer turned out to be fish sauce, the fermented fish liquid that’s the staple of many Southeast Asian cuisines. Inhabitants of Southern China depended on fish as their primary food source and learned that fermentation not only preserved their catch, the byproduct of the fermentation provided a tasty condiment. When the Han Chinese chased the “Yi barbarians,” more properly known at Khmer-Mon and Tai people, into Southeast Asia, fish sauce went with them. But the process of fermentation became popular in China where it led to soy sauce, spread to Japan in the form of sushi, and was seized upon by Western sailors when they found that Indonesian ke-tchup made their seaboard rations much more palatable. 

The earliest recipe for ketchup appeared in English in 1732, and was credited to a British trading post in Sumatra. When the sauce migrated to England, shallots, mushrooms, and walnuts gradually took precedence over the fermented fish, with a dash of anchovies giving a trace of its original flavor, (as is still found in ke-tchup’s descendant Lea  Perrins Worcestershire Sauce). In 1817 tomatoes took over and this is the version that traveled to America, where it became thicker, sweeter, and totally devoid of fish. (How the less appetizing name of “catsup” came about is still an unexplained mystery.)

Ketchup isn’t the only fermented Chinese invention to have invaded Western kitchens.  Although the creation of molasses is credited to India in 500 BCE, it took China to ferment it with rice and palm sugar, creating arrack, a liquor invented long before rum or gin. This was also seized upon by English sailors, probably with even more enthusiasm than they had for fish sauce. When arrack was mixed with citrus, sugar, spices, and water, the British Navy’s “punch” may have been the precursor to the cocktail--once again thanks to China.

Although China didn’t invent ice cream, if they hadn’t discovered gunpowder that dessert may never have come into being. Potassium nitrate or saltpeter was once called “Chinese snow” in Arabic because it was a major component of the gunpowder exported by China. Arabs were the ones to find that Chinese snow could chill water and centuries later it was used to create the first wine slushy in Italy. Sorbet soon followed.  

Jurafsky points out that the one food Americans adore and think of as being “Chinese” isn’t from China at all. Fortune cookies,  found in every old-school Chinese restaurant in the U.S., first appeared in Kyoto as little cookie-shaped crackers, each one holding a paper fortune. (A similar cookie is sold on the streets of Bangkok, but without the enclosed fortune.) Now almost 3 billion fortune cookies are made, sold, and eaten all around the world--but not in China, where sweets aren’t usually offered at the end of a meal.

The Language of Food dives deep into culinary matters--the vocabulary of menus and Yelp reviews, the importance of sound symbolism when it comes to giving a food a name, the way adjectives can reveal social class. But it’s in food history that the book excels, making us realize that without China, hamburgers might lack savor, there might be no such thing as Happy Hour,, Baskin-Robbins might never have become a household word, and some of us would be much thinner and far less happy.~Janet Brown

The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri (Harper)

Manil Suri’s comic novel The Death of Vishnu was inspired by a real person named Vishnu who lived on the steps of the apartment where the author grew up. Vishnu died on the landing after living there for many years. 

In the novel, Vishnu is a man who does odd jobs for an apartment block in Bombay, now known as Mumbai. He was named after the Hindu God Vishnu, the Deity of Preservation. The God Vishnu creates, protects, and transforms the universe. He currently lies dying on the staircase landing where he lives. He has been living there for the past eleven years. Mrs. Asrani, a resident of the apartment has been bringing Vishnu a cup of tea everyday for those eleven years, however, she doesn’t think he will drink it today as during the night he has thrown up and soiled himself. 

Vishnu was a drunk but managed to make a contract with the previous occupier of the landing, named Tall Ganga, to be her replacement as a ganga, a servant who does domestic chores for a number of households. The apartment dwellers found to their dismay that Vishnu was not up to doing a ganga’s duty. They thought of various ways to dislodge him from the landing but the cigarettewallas (walla being a suffix for “one associated with”), one who sells cigarettes and the paanwalla were aware that Vishnu made a deal with Tall Ganga to take her place and “since nobody actually owned landing, it was clear that all inhabitation rights to it now belonged to Vishnu.”

Vishnu isn’t quite dead yet and as the lives of the people in the apartment go on about their business, Vishnu reminisces about Padmini, the love of his life. All the residents have their own stories to tell and their relationship with each other is often confrontational, especially between the two married women Mrs. Asrani and Mrs. Pathak. The two families share a communal kitchen and often accuse each other of using more than their share of the apartment’s water supply.

The Jalals are the only Muslim family living in an apartment whose residents are mostly Hindu. Mr. Jalal is seeking to find a higher meaning in life and doesn’t understand the concept of faith. He often tried debating with his religious wife trying to persuade her that her faith has no logic or reasoning to be of any use. The Jalals have a son who is in love with Asrani’s daughter, Kavita. They are love-struck teenagers who plan to elope and neither family believes they are suitable for each other. 

And on the top floor of the apartment is Vinod Tanej, a man who lost his wife to cancer and has become a recluse himself as he continues to long for his wife. He only has contact with Small Ganga who still does various chores for him. 

It is when Mr. Jalal decides to sleep next to Vishnu on the landing where he has a vision and believes that Vishnu is not just a sick man, but the God Vishnu and he has been chosen to spread the word that people should worship Vishnu and treat him as a God. The dying Vishnu thinks maybe he is the incarnation of Vishnu the God and is in the process of changing the universe. 

Suri’s story blends Hindu mythology within a contemporary setting in present day India and we are left to ponder. Was Vishnu just a man or was he Vishnu the God? It is really left up to the reader to decide. ~Ernie Hoyt

Tales from the Cafe by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Hanover Square Press)

A tiny cafe set in central Tokyo, Funiculi Funicula is easy to overlook, but for some it’s a destination worth traveling to. In this place, if all of the conditions are met, customers can travel back in time to see anyone they wish--provided that person had once visited this cafe. The time travel can only begin when the would-be traveler has sat in a particular chair, one that is always occupied by the same woman who leaves it only once a day, when she goes to the toilet at a time that always changes. Travel begins once a cup of coffee has been poured and must end before the coffee gets cold, and during the visit to the past, there is nothing the traveler can do that will change life in the present. If the visit doesn’t end before the coffee gets cold, the visitor can only return to the present as a ghost, sitting in the cafe forever.

One man orders his coffee because he’s been lying to his daughter for 22 years. A young man who hadn’t gone to his mother’s funeral drinks his coffee while planning to let it turn cold because he intends to stay in the past.  A homicide detective wants to give his dead wife the birthday gift he had never been able to present to her. One unusual customer travels in reverse. He comes from the past to visit the future, longing to know that the woman he loved and was unable to marry is living a happy life. Each of these stories is heartwarming but even more so is the underlying plot--the lives of the people who run the cafe. The owner, the young waitress who is his cousin, his little daughter who longs to be the server of the coffee, and the mysterious woman who chose never to return from the past become the primary focus of this charming narrative and each one of them finds a satisfying, happy ending.

A combination of fable and fairy tale with a dash of science fiction, this is a novel that comes just at the right time. It sparkles with hope and love, with a piercing question posed on the page that would usually hold a dedication: If you could go back, who would you want to meet? In this era of loss, when many people died alone without the people they loved beside them, this is a haunting thought to consider, one that has been posed in many different mediums.

Tales from the Cafe is a sequel.  Playwright Toshikazu Kawaguchi adapted one of his own plays to become a novel, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, in 2015. It then became a film, Funiculi Funicula, in 2018 and in 2021 was underway to become a television series. Kawaguchi’s underlying message--that we honor the past by seeking happiness in the present--continues to resonate and comfort, both in its original Japanese versions and in its English translations. “Spring,” he says, “hides inside winter,” a thought we need to keep in mind, especially during a winter that seems as though it will never end. ~Janet Brown

eatlip gift : COOK BOOK for COOKING PEOPLE by Yuri Nomura (Magazine House)

eatlip gift is a cookbook and photography book by food director Yuri Nomura with full color pictures taken by photographer Yurie Nagashima. Unlike most cookbooks, pictures of the food are given one or two full pages with the name of the dish and the page where you can find the recipes. The recipes are all provided at the end of the book, after the pictures. There are fifty-seven recipes in total. For each dish, Nomura also provides an amusing anecdote related to the food item. 

At the time of this writing, Yuri Nomura presided over the food creative team “Eatrip”. She went to London in 1998, after that she worked at various restaurants. In 2010, she gained a lot of experience as she was employed at the highly praised organic restaurant in Berkeley, California, Chez Panisse. Her main job now consists of working reception parties, catering, teaching cooking classes, writes a food-related column in a magazine, hosts a radio show, and does a lot of food direction for television and commercials. She also opened her own restaurant in Tokyo called [eatrip] in 2012.

Totte oki nikushiminaku tsukuru. Nomura says this is something her mother passed on to her when making food. It translates to “Make special foods without loathing.” Cook, eat, and share. This is the ideal that Nomura strives for. She has divided the book into four categories - timeless, sharing, seasons, and for you. 

In the timeless category you will find recipes for the French specialty coq-au-vin (chicken braised with wine, lardons, mushrooms, and the optional garlic), an Italian dish from Milan called osso buco (cross-cut veal shanks braised with white wine, vegetables, and broth), Russian favorites pirozhki (baked bun with a variety of fillings) and borscht (beet soup). Nomura being Japanese, she has also included recipes for chirashi-sushi (scattered sushi, as you can add any toppings to sushi rice) and gyusuji no shiro miso nikomi (stewed beef tendon by white miso).

In the sharing section, you will find recipes that would be great at parties such as cheese dip or cauliflower dip. Also featured are avocado with ricotta cheese, the Spanish favorite paella, shrimp salad with lemon dressing, fruit shortcakes, octopus tapas and more. 

Next are some seasonal dishes. As the book was published in 2010, the year of the tiger according to the Chinese zodiac, Nomura starts off with a recipe for a dish called kuri-kinton pudding. Kuri-kinton is a sweet chestnut paste with a yellowish color and says it represents the color of the tiger. Spring is the season for mimosa flowers to bloom in Japan and Nomura has a recipe for mimosa cake. She shares her recipe for corn pancakes which she remembers were made from the white corn harvested in the summer from her father’s vegetable garden. 

Finally, in the “for you” section, recipes for food and snacks to share with friends, co-workers, and more. There is a very traditional Japanese tradition called sashiire in which a person will bring snacks to a group of people, such as people working late at the office or they can be for entertainers, musicians and actors alike, who can snack on them in their dressing rooms. 

Photographer Yurie Nagashima brings all the dishes to life. Full color pictures in all their mouth-watering glory. The text for the recipes are in Japanese and the measurements for ingredients are all in the metric system but even if you don’t cook or can’t read Japanese, it is still a wonderful book to look through. Perhaps the pictures of the dishes will inspire you to create your own culinary delight. ~Ernie Hoyt

Joan Is Okay by Weike Wang (Random House)

Joan is the kind of woman who makes dinner table conversation by complimenting her host’s utensils. At 36,  she has never had a boyfriend. She has no hobbies. She has no idea who or what Seinfeld is because she doesn’t own a television. Her apartment is so spartan that when her next door neighbor sees it, he asks if she had recently been robbed. 

Under five feet tall and weighing less than one hundred pounds, Joan is easy to overlook, unless she’s at work. In the ICU of a busy Manhattan hospital, she’s the attending physician, the one who teaches and supervises the other doctors, ““the most senior person in the room.” She’s “a gunner, and a new breed of doctor, brilliant and potent, with no interests outside work and sleep,” the hospital director says approvingly. 

Neither he nor anyone around her thinks this is peculiar behavior until the day Joan asks other doctors to cover her weekend shift. Her father has had a fatal stroke in Shanghai and she needs to attend his funeral. When she returns to the hospital 48 hours later, with 32 of those hours spent in the air, both the director and the human resources department are forced to realize that this may be an excessive work commitment that “the gunner” displays. She’s told to take time off, “to reassess, recenter, release.” “It’s only six weeks,” the director assures her, “time will fly.” “I couldn’t quite picture that,” Joan decides, “unless I was put in a coma.”

“I love my brother,” she tells the director when he asks about her family, “we met in Wichita.” Like many of Joan’s statements, this is eerily true. She didn’t know she had a brother until she was four and a twelve-year-old boy showed up, her parents’ first child whom they’d left in Shanghai with relatives six years before. That elusive quality characterizes her familial relationships. The minute Joan turns eighteen and enters Harvard, her parents move back to Shanghai, “their jobs as parents complete.” `Her final visit with her father is a quick chat in the hospital cafeteria that ends before she’s finished her cup of coffee and soon after his funeral, her mother announces her unexpected US arrival in a phone call that she begins with “This is your mother. I’m having terrible jet lag.” Her brother, rich and successful,  owns a ten-acre compound in Connecticut where the grass is cut “more often than I cut my nails,” Joan observes. Their visits are filled with his nagging that she leave the hospital and take up a more lucrative private practice. “I lost my brother,” she says, “the day he decided to become my parent.”

This should by rights be a grim novel about a woman who is clearly somewhere on the spectrum, with social skills that hover around absolute zero. Instead it’s hilarious. Although Joan’s mother is scathingly accurate when she tells her daughter, “You’re a very literal person,” Joan is a woman who refuses to tolerate pretensions and who regards the world without filters. She’s smart and funny and completely devoid of self-pity. “A person of two languages and two cultures,” Joan gives a unique perspective on “the gulfs within families…the migrations we have to make…the cost of love” without pomposity or finger-pointing. She --and this book--radiate pure delight and both are absolutely, stunningly, more than okay.~Janet Brown

2:46 Aftershocks : Stories from the Japan Earthquake (Enhanced Editions Ltd.)

Next month is the twenty-first anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, commonly referred to as 3-11. On March 11, 2011 at 2:46pm, a massive earthquake that registered 9.0-9.1 magnitude hit the Tohoku area of Japan. It was the most powerful quake to hit Japan and triggered a tsunami that reached a height of over one-hundred feet (over forty meters) which washed away people and their homes. The tsunami caused the disaster at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant as well. 

2:46 Aftershocks was recorded, written and published in just over a week after the disaster.  It was the brainchild of a man living in Abiko, Chiba Prefecture. The man who calls himself Our Man in Abiko explains, “The idea for this book came out of desperation; desperation to do something for a country on its knees.”

On the morning of March 18, 2011, one week after the quake, Our Man in Abiko wrote to @fatblueman, a group who became popular for their song “Christmas in Japan” on YouTube, to start writing a song for Japan quake survivors. It was this Tweet which got him thinking, “I want to compile a book of quake experiences and publish it like within a week and donate all profits to Red Cross.” 

Our Man in Abiko created a Twitter account with the #quakebook hashtag and tweeted, “If  everyone wrote 250 words - one page - or submitted their favorite (original) tweets, pics or artworks, I could edit, publish it in days.”

People from all over the world contributed pictures, stories, illustrations, prayers, and words of hope to unite the world in helping Japan get back on its feet. Many of the stories were written by the people who were there, living and experiencing one of the world’s worst disasters. A couple of celebrities donated their time and gave support to the project including Yoko Ono and cyberpunk author William Gibson. 

The Foreword to the book was written by Barry Eisler, the creator of a half-Japanese, half-American assassin named John Rain. Eisler says, “If my books have been love letters to Japan, this one is an SOS. I’m both proud and humbled to be a part of it, to be in a position to reach others who love Japan and long for Japan so that together we can give back some of what we received, and to do something to help Japan back to her feet.”

American journalist and Japanophile Jake Adelstein rewrote an article titled Muenbotoke, a term that literally translates to ‘Buddhas without connections’. The piece was originally published in the magazine Shambhala Sun. He related the story of a double-suicide of a couple whose bodies were never claimed by anybody. This made him think of the bodies that were never recovered from the tsunami. Adelstein ends his article with “May their memories last longer than the accident that took their lives. Because remembering them is all we can do for them now and for all those who lost their lives. And in the act of remembering, hopefully we will lead better lives and remember to care for all living things. We owe the dead that much.”

According to a press release on March 9, 2021, twenty years after the quake, the official figures reported 19,747 deaths, 6,242 injured, and 2,556 people still missing. Anybody who was living in Japan at the time knows exactly where they were and what they were doing. I was living in Tokyo at the time of the disaster as well. I had taken the day off from work and was sitting on the couch with my wife. She was watching television while I was on the phone with my parents who live in the States. The room started shaking but we didn’t give it much notice as we have been through the routine many times before. But this time, the shaking wouldn’t stop and was getting stronger as well. I had to cut my call quickly as my wife and I headed out the door of our fourth floor apartment. It is definitely not an experience I wish to relive. I currently live in the Tohoku area and hope and believe that I am also contributing to its recovery. ~Ernie Hoyt