The Artisans: A Vanishing Chinese Village by Shen Fuyu, trans. Jeremy Tiang (Astra House)

Forget about Wordle. Dismiss Quordle as a puzzle for amateurs. If you really want to send your brain into convulsions, pick up The Artisans and enter a never-ending maze.

This book begins innocently enough--it traces the past hundred years in a village that’s been in place for six centuries. Founded by a distant ancestor of the author, Shen Village was a community held in place by “rules formed around customs, ways of thinking and agreements,” where the residents were either related by blood or by proximity. Self-sufficient for most of its lifetime, it is now dying out, with its children leaving for the opportunities of urban life and factories encroaching upon its farmland. Shen Fuyu hasn’t lived there since he was eighteen but he says “When our hometowns vanish, we become rootless people.” Drawing upon stories from his grandfathers and his father as well as his own memories, he recreates a web of craftsmen who formed and strengthened the fabric of Shen Village, whose deaths ensured the death of their community. 

At first the villagers’ stories seem like a form of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, without the magic but with all the familiar characters--The Tailor, The Carpenter, The Blacksmith, The Clever Girl, The Village Beauty. The fortune of two different families are both destroyed in fires; one family recovers, the other disintegrates. A feud over property rights and a political execution are both touched upon in passing and later are shown to be linked. All of these misfortunes are the roots of pivotal events, with the connections between them revealed slowly and tortuously in convoluted tragedies. 

Imagine working on a jigsaw puzzle where all of the pieces keep shifting. At a certain point, it becomes obvious that this book needs to be read with paper and a pen close by. Mrs. Fifth Life, introduced briefly at the very beginning as the powerful widow of The Scale Operator’s Son, shows up near the end as a girl whose courage and brilliance rivals Scheherazade’s. The toothless old woman who was once The Village Beauty is the leading figure in a multi-generational tragedy. Craftsmen identified only by their trades are called by their real names much later, bringing them into complex family relationships that are as intricate as spiderwebs.

“That’s how life is, a series of interlocking circles,” Shen Fuyu says as he nears the end of his social history. Suddenly the interlocking circles of Shen Village become part of a galaxy, one of hundreds of thousands of similar communities across China, and the jigsaw puzzle becomes immense, a taste of infinity.

Shen Fuyu’s hometown, in common with other dying villages in China, has a shrine that holds the ancestral tablets, “a place to worship the ancestors of long ago, everyone’s common forbears.” If this shrine disappears, the villagers are left “all alone in the world.” The Artisans exists as a record of what once was. Through  the stories of the people whose work kept a community alive, it serves as a modern form of ancestral tablet, anchoring the descendants of Shen Village to their own history and to the history of the world.~Janet Brown

The Sushi Economy : Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg (Gotham)

Sasha Issenberg takes us on a journey to learn the history and evolution of a culinary item that people once discarded or used as cat food. The Sushi Economy introduces us to the world of tuna from its humble beginning as a cheap and easy to make street snack in Edo, the old name for Tokyo, to its prominence in the culinary world as a must have and must eat item for the jet set. 

Issenberg makes it clear that this is not the first book about sushi. It is not a cookbook “filled with glamorous food photography and do-it-yourself instruction on how to reproduce those delectable morsels. These books tend to suggest that all one needs to make sushi are a sharpened knife, plastic-wrapped bamboo mat, traditional wooden spatula, and Japanese pantry staples such as short-grain rice, vinegar, and dried seaweed.”

Issenbert believes that to understand the world of sushi culture, one needs to read about what goes into the making of suchi. It has to be “a narrative about the development of twentieth-century global capitalism”. He further states, “A Book that wants to revel in the beauty and deliciousness of sushi must be a celebration of globalization. This is that book.”

Issenberg sets up the book in four separate sections. Part One deals with the freight economy and the logistics of moving bluefin tuna from the Atlantic to the Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, Japan. It describes in detail the birth of modern sushi. Before sushi became a familiar item around the world, it was considered worthless throughout the world, the only market for the red tuna was as pet food. 

Part Two covers the food economy and how many young and ambitious entrepreneurs went about setting up sushi restaurants around the world and about their efforts to receive the best cuts of tuna from the world’s oceans. 

Part Three deals with the fish economy. The job of catching tuna in the wild is sporadic and uneven. The fisherman is never sure if his or her catch is going to win the jackpot for him. In order to make it possible for diners around the world to enjoy fresh tuna year round, Issenberg investigates the development of fish ranching for Bluefin Tuna. 

Finally, in Part Four, Issenberg discusses the future of the Tuna industry. The Atlantic Bluefin Tuna and others are in danger of being overfished and the world’s supplies are dwindling at a rapid rate. To solve the problem and to find more sustainable solutions, an organization called the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna was formed. The organization is known by the moniker of ICCAT and is called “eye cat”. 

Unfortunately for ICCAT, the organization has a high hurdle to overcome. The group has set rules for signatory nations but has no way of enforcing them. “Tuna is, like air, a placeless common resource, so it suffers from what economists call the commons problem : An individual nation has no motivation to limit its catches alone, since everyone else will continue to benefit.”

“The national fisheries that should be implementing ICCAT rules end up doing little but protecting their own lawbreakers against foreign intruders.” An American environmentalist, Carl Safina, had this to say about ICCAT. He said that ICCAT “might as well stand for International Conspiracy to Catch All the Tunas”. 

This book will appeal to foodie and economists alike. It is an interesting look into the world of how the tuna business evolved. As Michiyo Murata said in a 2010 New York Times article, “Originally, fish with red flesh were looked down on in Japan as a low-class food, and white fish were much preferred. ... Fish with red flesh tended to spoil quickly and develop a noticeable stench, so in the days before refrigeration, the Japanese aristocracy despised them, and this attitude was adopted by the citizens of Edo.”

As the child of a Japanese mother, I was exposed to sushi at an early age. However, I adopted the position of my American father who believed that raw fish was only good for fish bait or cat food. It wasn’t until I was older and perhaps wiser that I began to realize what I was missing. I will never forget my first taste of tuna, or magura as it’s now known. My mother jokingly offered me some believing I would never eat it. I surprised my mother and myself saying, sure, I will try it. I dipped the maguro sashimi in soy sauce with a bit of wasabi, and said to my mother, “It’s not bad. It’s pretty good” to which she responded, “NO!! Don’t say that, It’s too expensive!!” She certainly didn’t want to share any of her maguro with me!! ~Ernie Hoyt

Better to Have Gone: Love, Death and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville by Akash Kapur (Scribner)

History puts Utopia in a bad light. The concept has never worked very well, drenched as it is in failure, death, and tragedy. But what if the effort to achieve the ideal community simply has never been given the time it needs to evolve? The process isn’t pretty, as Akash Kapur shows in his story of “the quest for Utopia” in a barren region of India, but the end result is a town with an international population that thrives in a setting of “vibrant forest.” What was once “a moonscape” is now “a global model of environmental conservation.” But are the results worth the human sacrifice that this achievement demanded?

The “intentional community” of Auroville was born because of the unlikely meeting of three very different people: Sri Aurobindo, a Cambridge-educated Indian mystic, a wealthy French matron, Blanche Alfassa who believes in visions made incarnate, and a young Frenchman who spent his youth in concentration camps. Madame Alfassa recognizes Sri Aurobindo as the Indian seer who came to her in her dreams. She becomes his leading disciple and is known by the name he gives her, The Mother. Bernard, weighted to the breaking point by his years in the death camps, meets The Mother just before Sri Aurobindo dies, putting her at the forefront of the seer’s following. She gives Bernard a new name and, as Satprem, he becomes her primary henchman, propelled by the belief that The Mother is divine.

The Mother has a dream and at the age of 87, she reveals it to the world. She buys 90 acres of barren ground and announces this will become a “Tower of Babel in reverse,” an international community” that will belong “to humanity as a whole.” Three years later, the first settlers arrive, finding an empty desert.

Others join them, from India, Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States. They become obsessed with finding shelter, water, and food; they dig wells and build huts with their bare hands. They gather seeds that they find within animal droppings and nurture crops of native plants. An administrative group formed by The Mother raises funds and disburses money to Auroville’s inhabitants, who espouse a subsistence economy that has reduced them to peasants. Then The Mother dies and the money begins to trickle away. 

Political schisms crack through the utopian surface of Auroville and a form of cultural revolution blazes through the hearts and minds of the residents. Satprem has convinced most of them that The Mother is a divinity and the prevailing belief is She will provide them with what they need. She will heal the sick and bring up the children while the healthy adults work to venerate her memory. Medicine and education are regarded as unnecessary and the energy of Auroville is spent in building a multi-storied  edifice that will house The Mother’s spirit. 

Within this maelstrom of belief and chaos, two people become the poster children for disaster. A devout member of Auroville, a young Belgian beauty, falls from the heights of the construction project and is permanently paralyzed. The man who loves her, a wealthy patrician from New York who devotes his fortune to Auroville, becomes ill. Both of them refuse the medical help that would save them and they die young, with one survivor.

The woman’s daughter, Auroalice, has known no other world but Auroville. At fourteen she’s semi-educated and semi-feral, having grown up in a tribe of free-range children. She’s adopted by the sister of the wealthy patrician, is taken to live in The Dakota where Lennon and Yoko are her neighbors, and by chance meets a man who had been a childhood friend in Auroville, Akash Kapur. They marry.

Well educated and well off, the two of them live happily in Brooklyn until their pasts begin to claim them. Returning to Auroville with their young sons, they find it’s become a place where they can raise their children safely and happily, as well as a place where their own childhood histories have found peace.

Unsettling and uncomfortable, Better to Have Gone raises troubling questions. Kapur turns to Mao and Robespierre: “Revolution is not a dinner party.” “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” To create this ecological triumph, people died and children were sacrificed. 

Kapur says, “Children of utopias, “I’ve come to understand, are like exiles.” He and Auroalice were each rescued in different ways. Kapur’s parents never truly espoused the demands of Auroville; Auroalice became an orphan who was whisked into the wealth of Manhattan after fourteen years of a helter-skelter upbringing. Other children weren’t so fortunate and their stories go untold, “mere expedients on the journey to a new world.”~Janet Brown

Tokyo on Foot : Travels in the City's Most Colorful Neighborhoods by Florent Chavouet (Tuttle)

Florent Chavouet is a graphic artist who spent six months wandering around different neighborhoods in Tokyo while his girlfriend Claire was interning at some company in Japan. The only reason why he found himself in Japan.  He would go out with a set of sketchbooks and colored pencils along with a mamachari (a term used for the bicycles that most housewives use) and a folding chair. The result of his stay and his sketches led to the publication of Tokyo on Foot : Travels in the City’s Most Colorful Neighborhoods.

Chavouet’s opening statement in the book is “Tokyo is said to be the most beautiful of ugly cities.”  He also mentions in the beginning, “So this is a book about Japan. About a trip to Tokyo, to be precise. It’s neither a guide nor an adventure story, but that doesn’t mean you’ll avoid the out-of-date addresses of one or the digressive confidences of the other.” 

The six months period of Chavouet’s stay was between June and December, 2006. All the sketches included in the book are Chavouet’s interpretation of what he saw and how he saw the city’s neighborhoods. He has organized the book in which every chapter focuses on a certain neighborhood he visited. “The respective lengths of chapters in no way indicate the relative importance of the neighborhoods in the life of the city but rather my familiarity with them.” 

Each chapter is announced by a koban, a small and very local police station, often referred to as a police box whose officers main job is community policing. The illustration following the koban is a hand drawn map of the area listing the places that Chavouet thought were interesting 

Once you read the blurbs on the map and take the time to absorb it all into your head, then Chavouet then provides full color illustrations of those various neighborhoods, along with the people who inhabit the place such as the owner of a small shop in Machiya, located in the northern part of Tokyo. He also meets and draws pictures of a woman who runs an okonomiyaki stand in Takadanobaba at the Kotohira-gu Temple. This is where Chavouet also meets a Canadian graphic designer who told him about his lung operation and meditating on the Ganges in India. The Canadian left and came back later and handed Chavouet two-thousand yen for no apparent reason. Chavouet jokes it’s “the first money I earned in Japan.” 

In between many of the chapters of the book are “interludes” where Chavouet just indulges himself such as drawing his interpretations of the Strict Salaryman and the Cool Salaryman. The difference between Math Nerd Junior-High Student and Physics Nerd Junior-High Student. They are amusing and humorous and will put a smile on your face. 

He also draws from his experience as he tells us his impression of visiting a manga kissa, a shop that carries manga books guessing what the topics are just by looking at the covers. He surmises that the main themes are, “porn (soft, hard, kinky, gay, etc.), romantic stuff, and some sports”. 

As Chavouet mentions, this is not a guidebook, just what he saw and sketched when he wandered around Japan. He explored the neighborhoods of Machiya, Ikebukuro, Takadanobaba, Shinjuku, Shibuya, and more. Trendy neighborhoods, downtown neighborhoods, old neighborhoods, new ones. Every page is a visual treasure.

As a former and long-time resident of Tokyo, I can attest to the accuracy of the neighborhoods Chouvet has visited. His eye for detail is amazing. His illustrations draw you in and make you feel like you’re exploring the neighborhood on your own. If I feel homesick for Tokyo, I can always browse through Chavouet’s book and return anytime I want to. ~Ernie Hoyt

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au ( New Directions)

A dream you can’t quite remember, a path you know well that’s suddenly hidden by fog, a glimpse of a person you think you recognize who turns out to be a stranger--this is the disorientation that comes when reading this slender little book. Is it a mystery, a ghost story, jagged bits of travel memories transformed into a novella? 

A daughter and mother float through an enigmatic sojourn in Japan, together but barely connecting. They are ageless and unnamed, each born into a different language and each living in separate places that go unidentified. The mother carries memories of an early life in Hong Kong, one  that she left long ago and has shown to her daughter through fading photos and fragmented stories. The daughter offers her own fragments, using bits of her education to explain things her mother never learned.

But are the two of them really there, together? A hotel clerk insists only one person occupies the room that the daughter and mother share. The mother, after the two spend a day apart, walks toward her daughter as if she were approaching a “ghost she did not want to meet,” her breath released “in a little cloud, like a small departing spirit.” 

“It was strange at once to be so familiar and yet so separated.” This feeling pervades the entire book, filled as it is with the familiar and the disembodied, “halfway between a cliche and the truth.” Slowly the distance between the mother and daughter becomes a visible chasm, their lives so divergent that there’s no middle ground. As the novel unfolds, the daughter takes shape through her stream-of-consciousness memories, while the mother “might as well have been an apparition.” Perhaps she is. The pain of that possibility is never enlarged upon.

Instead readers are whisked along in a strange journey, one that’s so devoid of emotion that it’s almost numb but with intense and vivid sensory details that come as a constant surprise. “A strong, deliberate wind,” the taste of green tea ice cream that’s “bitter and pleasant,” a lake set within a crater, “uncanny and almost artificial,” persimmons lying “on the ground in a sweet pulp,” are alive and real, with the evocative precision that is usually found only in a poem. The story in its formlessness becomes inclusive, enveloping readers in a world that becomes their own, wrapping them in its avoidance of pain and its fluid impressionistic images.

Writing,” the daughter tells her mother, is “the only way one could go back and change the past, to make things not as they were, but as we wished they had been…” As she travels with someone who may not be there, making things as she wished they had been, she offers a space in which others can travel in their own way, with their own companion, “as we wished they had been.”

With the delicate tenacity and strength of a cobweb, Cold Enough for Snow lingers after it’s been read, teasing and tugging, calling for explorations of  its puzzling beauty just one more time. Its sentences carry the weight and comfort of a freshly washed blanket, “fragrant and thick.” in a meditative quest into what’s real, what’s imagined, and how the two realms overlap.~Janet Brown

Soldiers of God : With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage)

Robert K. Kaplan’s Soldiers of God was first published in 1990 with the subtitle “With the Mujahideen in Afghanistan”. He states that “it provides historical context for the emergence of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network. His final chapter of the new edition titled “The Lawless Frontier” was first published as a long article in the Atlantic Monthly and provides a follow up to post-Taliban Afghanistan.

In 1979, the former Soviet Union with the backing of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, attacked the small Central Asian nation  without provocation and continued to occupy the country until their withdrawal in 1988. 

Kaplan was one of the first American journalists to travel with the Mujahideen, a collective name for the insurgents, that fought a nine-year guerilla war against one of the world’s most powerful nations and won. Without them, it would not have been possible for Kaplan to even set foot in Afghanistan. 

During the war, the Soviets heavily mined the land of Afghanistan. No one is sure of the actual numbers. Britain’s BBC stated “millions”. The Afghan resistance claimed five million. The U.S. government’s estimate was about three million. However, in 1988, a State Department spokesman said the figure was more likely “between ten and thirty million”. According to Kaplan, “that would be two mines for every Afghan who survived the war.” 

In order to report on the war, journalists first had to get to the war but this required more effort than it was worth for most of the media. Not only did the journalists have to contend with the dangers of stepping on a mine, they were faced with boredom, disease, and exhaustion. 

In the beginning, Kaplan reported the news from Peshawar, the closest city to Afghanistan but is located in Pakistan. He was determined to see for himself the realities of the war that virtually the whole world was unaware of. 

In one of his final journeys “inside”, and supposedly after the Mujahideen secured the nearest airport in Kandahar, a city located in the northern part of Afghanistan, Kaplan saw with his own eyes that the Soviets were sending some soldiers back to the city and were also using the airport. When he mentions this to an American diplomat, the government man responds by saying Inter-Services Intelligence, the intelligence agency of Pakistan, reassures the U.S. that this is not the case. 

Traveling with Kaplan and his Mujahideen companions makes this book read more like an Ian Fleming spy novel without the women or gadgets that help James Bond. It’s also very scary because it’s real. Americans don’t realize it but it was a proxy war between the Soviet Union and the U.S. with the U.S. government providing arms to the mujahideen to fight the communist forces. It was a veiled Vietnam War that wasn’t given national coverage so most Americans did not see the tragedy from the comforts of their home in their living rooms. 

Now, here in the 21st century, Russia has attacked a sovereign nation without cause for its own gain and is being condemned by the international community. It appears that the current president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, didn’t study up on the history of his nation. The Ukrainians are not going to willingly agree to the terms set by Putin’s government to end the current war. 

Putin’s demands are for the Ukraine to agree that the Crimea as part of Russia (another piece of land that was seized illegally by the Russians), to recognize to the two pro-Russian provinces in the Ukraine, Luhansk and Donetsk, as independent nations, and to promise not to try joining the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). Putin states his reasons for military action is to “deNazify” the Ukraine. I’m sorry, but the only Nazi in this scenerio is the current president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin. And so once again, we see history repeating itself. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir by Karen Cheung (Random House)

Karen Cheung was four years old in 1997 when Hong Kong’s handover took place. She grew up believing that the policy of “One country, two systems” would be in place for 50 years and that Hong Kong was protected by the rule of law. The Sino-British Joint Declaration stated that Hong Kong people would administer Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s chief executive would be elected by its citizens or through local caucuses, a policy that would lead to universal suffrage and democracy. When this failed to take place, protests against a national security bill that would ban “sedition, treason, subversion, and secession,” began in 2003. From then on, Hong Kong held a thriving community of activists and dissidents.

There was much to protest, much to change: Hong Kong’s “land problem” that led to high rents, squalid housing, and government confiscation of rural villages; mental health care that was largely inaccessible even to affluent expatriates; and a disregard that bordered on intolerance for “non-conformist art.” When the protests of 2003 made Hong Kong’s chief executive withdraw the controversial national security bill and resign from office, it seemed as though change was possible. Instead the problems grew worse. 

Cheung grows up without a strong identification as a Hong Kong citizen. Until she turns 18, she is shaped by her grandmother’s Chinese customs and Taoist traditions and by the English language that she’ s steeped in at an international school for six years.  When she transfers to a public school run by Christians, where students are allowed to speak  Cantonese,  the curriculum is taught in English. After six years there, Cheung is fluent in English and the English literature that she has read compulsively convinces her that Western culture is superior. In Kowloon where 90% of the population is Chinese and English is considered “a snobbish anomaly”, she longs for a life in London or New York. When she at last goes to the island of Hong Kong and enters Hong Kong University which is “vaguely international,” she feels a step closer to the life she wants.  In 2014 she spends a semester in Glasgow and watches the Umbrella Revolution from another country, suddenly and painfully realizing her home is in Hong Kong, the place where her life is waiting. “We recognize all of its imperfections, and still refuse to walk away.”

The subtitle of The Impossible City says it’s a Hong Kong memoir and that’s exactly what it is. “This book is about the many ways a city can disappear,” Cheung says. Her own story is told merely as a fragment of life in Hong Kong, used as an illustration in  “documenting disappearances.” Her personal narrative gives depth to the stranglehold tycoons have on Hong Kong’s real estate, showing how extreme wealth controls everything from housing to public services. To gain an apartment in government-subsidized housing can mean a five-year wait;  instead people rent bunk-bed spaces in illegally subdivided apartments for over 400 US dollars a month. Others sleep in Japanese-inspired “space capsules”  or in “caged homes,” beds surrounded by barbed wire. SARS and a long period of political protests give rise to depression and PTSD. 

Student suicides rise by 76% in the years between 2012 and 2016. “There are only around four hundred psychiatrists in a city of over seven million people.” where a government census showed “one in seven Hong Kongers live with mental health conditions.”

“What unites Hong Kongers,” Cheung says, “is pain.” Suicidal herself, she finds a new life in the creative energy and freedom of the city’s indie music scene. Surrounded by people who live “alternate lives” in a version of Hong Kong that Cheung wants to inhabit, she finds her way to the industrial buildings of East Kowloon and begins to write about what she hears and sees there. “Music is the archive of the times,” she says. From there she begins recording other forms of archives in Still/Loud, an online magazine that focuses on Hong Kong’s culture, not its lifestyle. 

Her examination of expat and Asian American writers who dominate Hong Kong’s English-language journalism and literature, reporting and telling stories “through their lens,” is scathing. Hong Kong locals who write in English, as Cheung does,  are frequently mistaken for members of the diaspora, usually as Asian Americans, and she is told by a newspaper editor to write stories that can be understood by “a Texas grandfather.” After three of her essays are published in the New York Times, other publications ask for pieces that tell “how it feels” to live in political turmoil.  As a Hong Kong writer with English fluency, writing for “the foreign gaze,” Cheung frequently feels like “a language traitor…betraying her mother tongue.”

Protests against a new version of the 2003 anti-sedition bill in 2019 are halted by Covid. On June 30, 2020 the bill becomes law. National security police scour the city for forms of dissidence while police hotlines welcome people who will report on neighbors who breach the law. The maximum sentence for this is life imprisonment.

Although employees who work in city government offices take loyalty oaths and teachers are given “patriotic syllabi” for their classrooms, a writer on Twitter claims “It’s absolutely not that bad for the average Hong Konger…that is 99% of the population.” For Cheung and her friends, “Are you leaving?” is a frequent question. Cheung’s reply is “I’m not ready.” She’s still recording what she knows will disappear. “Hong Kong,” she says, “will be physically unchanged but there will be nobody here that remembers the place that once existed….The only ones left {will be} those who believe this is the best version of Hong Kong there could ever be.” In showing the possibility that’s been taken away, The Impossible City is a record of what’s been lost. But, Cheung says with more than a trace of irony, “We are always so attuned to loss in this city.”~Janet Brown

The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli (Harper)

The Lotus Eaters is Tatjana Soli’s first novel. She has set her story amidst the Vietnam War, or as the Vietnamese call it, the American War. It focuses on a woman named Helen Adams, a woman who dreams of becoming a photographer for Life magazine. She is also torn between two men she loves - Sam Darrow, her mentor and Nguyen Pran Linh, an ex-soldier and assistant to Darrow. 

The story opens with the fall of Saigon. The time is April 1975. At this time, Helen had been in Vietnam for over ten years. She and Linh are on their way out of the country. Linh may be Vietnamese but he has papers that will allow him to flee on one of the last flights out of the country. As the two rush to the U.S. Embassy, Lihn is shot and injured. Helen is determined that they will both leave, although unknown to Lihn, she plans to stay to cover the changeover. 

The story then goes back to the beginning when Helen first goes to Vietnam. After losing her brother in the war, Helen decides to go to Vietnam and tries to make a name of herself as a photojournalist. There she meets prize-winning journalist Sam Darrow. It is not love at first sight as Darrow treats her like a child but he takes her under his wing and she develops a love for him knowing full well that he is a married man and constantly feels as if she is being watched by his assistant Linh. 

After Darrow is killed in a helicopter accident, the bond between Helen and Linh gets stronger. However, Linh is a very private man. Helen does not know as yet that he was a former soldier fighting for the North but deserted the army and headed to Saigon with his wife. Helen does not know the burden Linh carries with him wherever he goes. His wife is dead, he is a deserter, and yet he is also attracted to Helen. 

The love triangle between Helen, Sam, and Linh and their relationship with each other seems to play out as a soap opera at times and the background of all three characters makes you care for them as real people. Their strong personalities can sometimes be aggravating but when you take into consideration the time and circumstances, one can imagine that you need to be strong in order to love and survive in a war zone. 

Soli was inspired by the female journalists who worked in Vietnam during the war. In her research she came across people such as Catherine Leroy, Kate Webb, and Barbara Gluck but it was the true story of Pham Xuan An, “a North Vietnamese intelligence agent who also was working undercover as a journalist for Time magazine” which would set her on her path to completing this novel. 

The Vietnam War may have ended for both countries and for Helen and Linh, but that didn’t stop the world from continuing their various conflicts. The war may have officially ended in 1975 but the next conflict to make headlines was the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia and the beginnings of the “killing fields”. 

It is one thing for governments and people to say, “Never again!” Yet it seems apparent that we as a people haven’t learned anything from our past. Following Vietnam, there was the genocide in Cambodia, the Bosnian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, and now Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked attack on the Ukraine. When will there be a time when people say “Never again!” and really mean it? ~Ernie Hoyt