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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Longer Human : Complete Edition by Usamaru Furuya (Kodansha)

Recently, I decided to revisit a Japanese classic, a graphic novel written by Usamaru Furuya that’s based on the Osamu Dazai book No Longer Human (Asia by the Book August 4 2022). I was expecting the same bleak story when I read this in manga form but was in for quite a surprise. 

Although the main characters remain the same, the story is told through the eyes of the manga artist Usamaru Furuya and the story is updated to the present era. The story opens with Furuya talking to one of his employees saying he hasn’t come up with an idea for the next serial. As he surfs the Internet, he comes across something called “ouch diary”. An anonymous reader wrote, “I got depressed reading it. But I can’t stop reading it. Take a look!”. A URL was provided and the title was No Longer Human. 

An “ouch diary”? Curiosity piques the manga artist’s interest and he clicks the URL. What pops up is the title Yozo Oba’s Albums where there are three pictures of Yozo, one at age 6, another at age 17, and the last at age 25. 

The artist first clicks on the age 6 picture. His first impression is that Yozo must be from a wealthy family but he can’t help noticing that the smile on Yozo’s face seems to be fake. “What a creepy kid,” he decides

Usamaru then clicks on Yozo at 25 and can’t believe his eyes. He says out loud, “He’s 25 in this one? He looks like an old man. His face is totally lifeless”. He also clicks on Yozo at 17 and is taken for another loop. “Wha…What a handsome young man,” Usamaru thinks to himself, “What could have happened to him between these three photos.

The guy’s name is Yozo Oba and his diary is titled No Longer Human. 

The book is divided into twelve entries. Usamaru clicks on the first one titled Yozo Oba and is greeted by the line, “I’ve lived a life full of shame.” In that first section, Yozo Oba writes about his high school years playing the class clown because he wants people to like him. He then writes about going to an art prep school where he meets Masao Horiki who becomes his friend and mentor in wining, dining, and general debauchery. 

As Usamaru continues to search the Internet for material for his next serial manga, he keeps going back to Yozo Oba’s diary, No Longer Human. What he says of Oba’s diary is “He revealed his actions and inner thoughts in surprisingly vivid detail…”

Usamaru reads through until the end of the diary he finds an afterward written by Yozo’s friend Masao Horiki. Horiki found out that Yozo was taken into custody by the police after they found him wandering the streets, coughing up blood. After an examination, he was arrested, indicted for drug use, sentenced to probation and put in a rehabilitation facility. This is where Horiki rekindles his friendship and would visit Yozo quite often, but one day, Yozo just disappears. 

Horiki explains why he has posted Yozo’s diary without his friend’s consent and pleads with any readers that if they know his whereabouts to contact him. In the manga, Usamaru Furuya writes that he regretted reading the diary until the next morning, then went to bed. However, he can not get Yozo Oba out of his head. 

In the manga, Usamaru decides to go in search of Yozo Oba or to at least confirm if he really existed or not. He does discover that there really was a Yozo Oba and that he may still be alive somewhere…

Usamaru Furuya’s adaptation of Osamu Dazai’s novel may seem a bit bleak but it is not quite as depressing as Dazai’s original. His drawings really draw the reader into the story of Yozo Oba’s life. At times, the diary reads like a desperate call for attention. Oba’s utter lack of self-esteem and self-worth are depressing. Reading about his downward spiral will make you want to re-evaluate your own life to help you determine if, as Yozo Oba says, “Human beings terrify me!” ~Ernie Hoyt

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (Atlantic Monthly Press)

The Inheritance of Loss is a novel written by Kiran Desai. Desai was born in India in 1971 and got her education in India, the U.S. and in England. It is her second novel and was originally published in 2006. It won the Booker Prize the same year, a prize given to the best work written in the English language and published in either the U.K. or Ireland. 

The story is about two main characters, Biju and Sai. Biju is an illegal alien living in the United States and trying to get that one precious item many Indians long for…an American green card. He is the son of the cook who works for Sai’s grandfather. Sai lives in a mountainous region called Kalimpong in the state of West Bengal at a place called Cho Oyu. She is an orphan but lives with her maternal grandfather, the cook that works for him, and a dog named Mutt. 

Sai’s grandfather, Jemubhai Patel, is a retired judge who despises Indians and their way of life. He hates the lifestyle of Indians. The way they dress, the way they eat— so he eats chapatis, an Indian-style flatbread, with a fork and knife. 

Away from the prying eyes of the international community, a small group of Maoists are trying to make a country for themselves in Nepal. During the same era, a small group of rebels are fighting against the Indian government to create a nation called Ghorkaland, an area in West Bengal, for the Nepali-speaking Indians.  The story opens with a couple of young Ghorkas entering Cho Oyu who demand that Sai’s grandfather give them his guns. They vanish as suddenly as they appear and the Judge calls the police the following day. 

The police interview both the judge, his granddaughter and the cook but seem to be as inept as the young Ghorkas. The three people who live at Cho Oyu just want to live happy, quiet lives. The judge is a grumpy old man who reminds one of American sitcom icon Archie Bunker, although the judge is not quite as bigoted as Archie. Sai is more interested in her flourishing relationship with her tutor Gyan while her grandfather is waiting for his son to become a success in the United States and perhaps invite him to live in the land of milk and honey.

The book might come off as a bit depressive but it does have its comic moments. Desai’s story is about the ever elusive effort of belonging to someone or somewhere. She shows the contrast between Indians who despise their own kind, such as Sai’s grandfather, and yet are not accepted by the British whom they try to mimic. It is also about the anger other Indians have for people like Sai’s grandfather, believing that they are not interested in keeping their traditions. In the end, in Desai’s story, nobody seems to be happy. Not Sai, not her grandfather, and certainly not Biju who has to move from one job to another to escape being caught by agents for the U.S. Immigration Department. 

It’s my belief that life is only as good as you make it, no matter the circumstances. As one of the old cliches goes, “Even a broken clock is right twice a day”. ~Ernie Hoyt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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