Have You Eaten Yet? by Cheuk Kwan (Pegasus Books)

Cheuk Kwan has lived in six different countries and speaks at least six different languages, including several Chinese dialects. Born in Hong Kong without ever having seen the Mainland village that was his family’s home for countless generations, he is a perfect example of the 400 million members of the Chinese diaspora.  Haunted by a single question, “Are we defined by our nationality or our ethnicity,” Kwan believes every member of the Chinese diaspora has a common set of values, even if they don’t, as a Chinese Canadian journalist believes they do, “carry that invisible baggage of ancestral China on our backs.” These shared values--”the importance of family ties, a desire for Chinese culture and education, and an underlying love for Chinese food”--can be found living in family-run Chinese restaurants all over the world. To back up his belief, Kwan embarks upon a four-year quest that will take him over 124,000 miles across five continents to make a documentary series, Chinese Restaurants. (Released in 2006, this series can be seen for free on YouTube.)

Have You Eaten Yet? fleshes out what Kwan compressed into fifteen separate episodes and allows him a voiced subjectivity and breadth of experience that would be out of place on television. This book is a combination of travel and cooking literature, with a large helping of history and not a single recipe in sight. 

Kwan and his camera men have Hong Kong cuisine as their benchmark and are surprised to find “dim sum to die for” in Trinidad and Tobago, “a classic Cantonese rendition” of whole tilapia in Israel, “a sublime Chinese meal” in Kenya that emerges from a kitchen staffed only by Kenyan cooks. In Mauritius he finds “authentic Hakka cuisine” and Northern Chinese cooking in South Africa. In Madagascar, Madame Chan serves Cantonese dishes that are “impeccable,” even though she herself has never been to China or Hong Kong and there are no Chinese workers in her kitchen.

In the north is where Chinese cooking submits to local flavors. In Saskatchawan, a seasoned restaurateur admits his cafe serves “American Chinese food, not what Chinese people eat, right?” In the Himalayan city of Darjeeling, Kwan tactfully calls his meal “Indo-Chinese…Hakka food adapted to Indian tastes.”

Kwan finds Chinatowns in almost every place he visits but it’s Barrio Chino in Havana that seems to haunt him. Once the largest and richest Chinatown in Latin America, it’s now a tourist destination with no more than 200 inhabitants, almost all of them elderly men. But when Kwan visits the Hong Kong Association and identifies himself as “a Kwan from Gao Gong,” he is thronged by members of his clan, making him remember his grandfather saying that many men from Gao Gong went off to Cuba in the early 1900s. Suddenly, in a Chinatown that’s almost dead, Kwan feels a strong connection to a place he’s never seen. “My grandfather,” he thinks, “would feel proud of me now.”

The old men in Havana still feel they are completely Chinese. In a Brazilian restaurant that makes perfect egg tarts, the owner says “This is our home, while his son adds that he himself is more Brazilian than Chinese. In Peru a restaurant proprietor talls Kwan, “This has never been my own country,” while celebrity cookbook author Ken Hom, born in Tucson and raised in Chicago, felt instantly at home on his first trip to Hong Kong “where everything talked to me,”  but now divides his time  between the south of France and Thailand. Kwan himself insists “I have six homes: Jiujiang (Gao Gong), Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Berkeley, and Toronto.” Even so his journey has taught him that he is connected most strongly with the Chinese diaspora, people who retain their Chinese heritage and yet usually find their sense of belonging all over the world. 

As for “Chinese food,” Kwan raises his eyebrows more than a trifle. This catchphrase encompasses the “eating habits of more than a billion people,” spread out over “an area four times larger than western Europe.” Can anyone say there is such a thing as “Chinese food” or that “hyphenated Chinese food” is a lesser form of cuisine, he asks. 

Have You Eaten Yet? Is enough to make us believe in the idea of one world. John Lennon would have loved this book, and so will you.~Janet Brown

Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly (Grand Central Publishing)

Harry Bosch is a detective who works for the Los Angeles Police Department. He is separated from his wife and teenage daughter who currently live in Hong Kong. Bosch is familiar with a liquor store in South L.A. called Fortune Liquors. He was given a matchbook by the owner that had a motto written inside it—“Happy is the man who finds refuge in himself”. He has kept this matchbook with him for many years. Now, the store’s owner has been murdered and he vows to catch the criminal who did it.

The victim, John Li, was also the owner of the store. The person who found him was his wife who doesn’t speak English. Bosch is joined by a detective in the AGU, the Asian Gang Unit. In the course of their investigation, the two detectives manage to link the crime with a Hong Kong triad. Apparently, an LA-based triad was collecting protection money from various businesses, including Fortune Liquors. 

The detectives also learned that Li owned another liquor shop in the valley that was run by his son Robert Li. The extended family lived together in a location between both shops. The son had told Detective Bosch that he and his family had tried talking to his father about closing the shop in South L.A. and the area wasn’t safe but his father wouldn’t listen. His father wasn’t going to let anybody drive him out. 

Bosch and Chu believe they found their suspect in the killing of John Li. Bo-Jing Chang is known to be affiliated with one of the Triad groups working in L.A. and his picture was captured on the liquor store’s security camera. Bosch then receives an anonymous call telling him to back off from the investigation. Bosch and Chu believe they are on the right track but then things get personal.

Bosch is sent a video clip of his daughter who has been abducted in Hong Kong. He believes her kidnapping is related to his current investigation. He takes the next plane to Hong Kong to save his daughter as his number one suspect is planning to flee the U.S. and not return. Bosch knows he has only twenty-four hours to find his daughter before the suspect walks free. 

In Hong Kong, he is helped by his ex-wife, a former FBI agent, and her Chinese friend, Sun Yee. Bosch has determined where his daughter is being held from the background on the video he was sent. He is positive that she is in a room in Kowloon.

Kowloon when translated into English means Nine Dragons, a name spawned from a legend. Bosch’s daughter one told him that “during one of the old dynasties the emperor was supposedly just a boy who got chased by the Mongols into the area that is now Hong Kong. He saw the eight mountain peaks that surrounded it and wanted to call the place Eight Dragons. But one of the men who guarded him reminded him that the emperor was a dragon too. So they called it Kowloon— Nine Dragons”. 

Michael Connelly’s Nine Dragons is the fourteenth book in a series that features LAPD detective Harry Bosch. This fast-paced and exciting mystery takes you from the streets of L.A. to the gritty underside of Hong Kong and Kowloon. It’s a page turner that keeps you guessing until the end who actually committed the crime of killing John Li. Was it a member of the Triads? Could it have been John Li’s son? And how did they get to Bosch’s daughter so quickly? The answers to these questions may surprise you and may shock you as well. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America by Saket Soni (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)

The U.S. Gulf Coast had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A year later, it was “a construction site of postwar proportions.” Over a million houses had been destroyed and crippled oil rigs needed either repairs or outright rebuilding from scratch. To hire skilled American labor meant paying union wages--welders, pipefitters, plumbers, and electricians didn’t come cheap. But there was a pool of experience that waited to be tapped--workers on Middle Eastern oil rigs who came from India, all of them easily lured by the thought of getting a U.S. green card. Not only would they be a source of cheap labor, they were a way to make some fast money. These men would pay anything to bring wealth and security home to their extended families and to give their children the opportunity to live well in America.

Five hundred Indian workers paid $20,000 each in response to an ad that promised “Permanent Lifetime Settlement In USA For Self And Family.” In two years or less, they would be given green cards. Their parents borrowed the money, sold their land, mortgaged their lives to give their sons this chance. Almost ten million dollars went to the men who made this swindle a success. 

When the workers arrive in America, they are shunted into labor camps where they paid $245  a week for a bunk in “a sardine-can trailer. They wait in line for their turn to use the toilets and showers in another trailer and then queue up to get breakfast in the cafeteria. The toilets overflow, the showers leak water that soak the walls and floors, the bread is moldy, and the workers get sick. They complain about the conditions but their main concern is when could they expect to receive their green cards. Nobody has answers for them and their complaints are met with a force of hired goons. They’re threatened with deportation if they don’t submit to the conditions of the camp. Then one of them hears about an Indian in New Orleans whose job is to help workers. He calls a number on a business card and reaches labor organizer Saket Soni.

A man still in his twenties with immigration difficulties of his own, Soni is a man who isn’t afraid to take desperate measures. Slowly and carefully, he arranges a solution that deserves to be in a movie. In the two camps that housed the five hundred workers, one located in Mississippi and the other in Texas, the Indian workers walk out of the gates that bar them from the world outside.

Soni makes the case that human trafficking has been reinvented in 21st century America. The five hundred men had been recruited through fraudulent means, with the recruiter keeping their passports as insurance that none of them would back out of the arrangement. Once they were on the job site, their impressive debt incurred in hopes of obtaining a green card kept them in involuntary servitude. They had to pay off that debt before they could return home.

When appeals to the Department of Labor go unanswered, Soni ventures into deeper drama--a march from New Orleans to Washington DC, a hunger strike to call attention to the workers’ case. But this is America where politics run deep below every surface. When it becomes known that ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) had been blocking their case from the very beginning, the workers and Soni himself are certain their cause was a hopeless one.

This book is a crash course in immigration policy, labor issues, and the intertwining of business interests with government agencies. Both a human tragedy and an example of how justice can prevail in spite of apparently insurmountable obstacles, The Great Escape rivals any fictional thriller for sheer nail-biting scenarios--but in this case they all happened in real life. Although this group of workers ended up with what they’d been promised, who knows how many more are being defrauded without recourse in this country, every day?~Janet Brown

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Books)

Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese-American poet whose debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous became a New York Times Bestseller. The main character, Little Dog, is writing a letter to his mother. He knows it’s a letter she will never read as his mother is illiterate. It is more about Little Dog coming to terms with his own life by revisiting his past. 

Little Dog first reminisces about his mother—the way she hurt him when he was still a child. The first time she hit him, he was only four years old. Then there was the time with the remote control that left a bruise on his forearm but he told his teachers, “I fell playing tag”.  Another time, he writes about his mother throwing a box of Legos at her head. 

Little Dog writes to his mother and says he was thirteen when he finally told her to stop hurting him. He looked deep into her eyes, the way he learned to do with the bullies that used to hit him. His mother turned away as if nothing happened. He writes to say, “we both knew you’d never hit me again”. 

Little Dog writes this letter when he’s in his late twenties. He is putting down on paper the history of his life. He knows he was born in Vietnam and was given a name that meant Patriotic Leader of the Nation. He not only writes about his mother, but his grandmother, Lan, as well. They were survivors of the war, then they were refugees, and now they live in Hartford, Connecticut. 

He writes how Lan ran away from an arranged marriage and became a prostitute during the Vietnam War and how she married an American serviceman, then gave birth to a child, his mother, Rose. However, Rose was not the child of the soldier Lan married as she was already four months pregnant when she met him. 

Rose doesn’t have much of an education as her schoolhouse collapsed after the Americans dropped napalm over the place she lived. It is because of the war that Rose suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She marries an abusive man but manages to leave him. 

Halfway through the novel, Little Dog makes his confession to his mother about his first true relationship—a white boy named Trevor, born and bred in America. whom he meets while working on a tobacco farm one summer when he is only seventeen. This relationship continues into adulthood but ends in tragedy as Trevor becomes a heavy drug user. 

What’s fascinating about this story is the fact that it mirrors Vuong’s life. However Vuong makes no attempt to write a chronologically correct timeline of Little Dog’s life. His nonlinear approach makes the story hard to follow at times. The reader is often left wondering what Vuong is actually trying to convey and although the book has received praise and many accolades for a first novel, I may be in the minority as I found it self-indulgent and tedious. If this is the new wave of fiction, I will gladly find my way back to the classics. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Great Passage by Shion Miura, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (Amazon Crossing)

Award winning Japanese writer Shion Miura has written a story about compiling the most comprehensive Japanese dictionary titled Dai Tokai which translates into English as The Great Passage. Originally published in Japanese as 船を編む （Fune wo Amu）in 2011 by Kobunsha, her novel is translated into English by Juliet Winters Carpenter who also translated Miura’s books The Easy Life in Kamusari (Asia by the Book, March 2023) and Kamusari Tales at Night.

The novel was adapted into a major motion picture. Released in 2013, it has won several awards including  the Japanese Academy Award for Best Film in 2013. It was selected as the Japanese entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 86th Academy Awards but was not nominated. 

Kohei Araki has been fascinated by words ever since he was a little boy, amazed that one word could have so many different meanings. He receives his first dictionary from his uncle when he starts junior high school. He enjoys opening his dictionary and leafing through it. He loves “the entrancing cover, the closely printed lines on every page, the feel of the thin paper. Most of all, he liked the concise definitions”. 

After he graduates from high school, Araki finds a job working for Gembu Books. He becomes an editor and for the next thirty-seven years, all he works on are dictionaries, with his mentor Professor Matsumoto. Araki becomes a lexicographer, a person who compiles dictionaries. He believes that a dictionary is “a boat to carry us across the sea of words” and the latest project in the Dictionary Editorial Department is to create The Great Passage. However, he is on the verge of retirement and wants to spend more time with his ailing wife. He is determined to find a suitable successor to take his place. 

Araki is tipped off by Masashi Nishioka, a salesman for the department,  that there is a likely candidate in the company, a person by the name of Mitsuya Majime in the Sales Department. Socially awkward, quiet and reserved, he has been with the company for only three years after finishing graduate school, has a background in linguistics, and is a collector of antiquarian books. 

Mitsuya Majime joins the Dictionary Editorial Department and is introduced to the rest of the team—Professor Matsumoto, Masashi Nishioka, the person who gave the tip about Majime to Kohei Araki, and Mrs. Kaoru Sasaki, whose job it is to keep track of index cards and classify them. 

Majime lives in a rooming house with his landlord, an elderly woman named Take. He is currently the only boarder and currently uses the rooms on the first floor of the building to store his immense collection of books. 

He meets Kaguya Hayashi, a new boarder at the house who’s the grandchild of Take. She has returned from studying cooking at a culinary school. Her presence flusters Majime. He is smitten with her but does not know how to talk to girls and has never dated one either. 

The Great Passage reads like two stories in one book. The first is the creation of the dictionary. The other is about the budding romance between Majime and Kaguya. The story is reminiscent of The Professor and the Madman, which is the story of the making of the English Oxford Dictionary. Majime and Araki may come off as madmen themselves, as their dedication to their work knows no bounds. It’s a moving story of friendship, love, romance, and one thing that bonds all of us together—words! ~Ernie Hoyt

Welcome Me to the Kingdom by Mai Nardone (Random House)

A teenage couple comes to Bangkok from the rural northeast of Thailand hoping to find the glamorous life they’ve seen on television, only to discover the glittering metropolis “didn’t live up to our expectations.” They arrive with a 30-day deadline to find good jobs. When that expires, the girl goes to work in a bar, meets a middle-aged American, marries him, and has, despite her best—or worst—efforts, a daughter who grows into brilliance. 

A child whose wealthy family escaped from the Cultural Revolution by floating down the Mekong into Thailand loses his fortune when economies topple across Asia in 1997. His Thai-born daughters speak three languages, one of which they acquire at a British International school that was built on land endowed to it by their grandfather.

A cluster of “strayboys,” rescued from the streets by a collective of former bar girls, build a shack of their own in the undergrowth of the slum they live in. Using an abandoned badminton net that they scavenged, they fish glass and plastic bottles from a canal and sell their catch to a recycler for a handful of coins.

The daughter of an Elvis impersonator is trained to take over his bar when he dies and becomes the prey of a corrupt policeman. Submitting to his appetites, she indulges her own only when she’s away from him, ordering a banquet of succulent dishes and then taking only a taste or two from each. 

All of these children grow into their destinies, with their lives colliding, intersecting, jolting apart. Within their orbits lie Thai boxing matches, cockfighting battles, clandestine gambling dens, routes of the impromptu first responders—”corpse carriers” who vie to be the first at every accident scene, the bars filled with “cheer-beer” girls who make a living by providing the “girlfriend experience” to male travelers in search of “make-believe,” and the brutal, easily obtained jobs on construction sites. 

The settings of these interlinking short stories are grim, the characters within them are survivors, each bearing a hard-won form of triumph. At the heart of their lives, Bangkok blazes like a ravenous flame, its sensual beauty giving a luster to the grim environment that all of these children know intimately, regardless of how they grew into adulthood.  Placed in random order, their stories convey the jangling energy and random chaos of Thailand’s primate city, a place where social classes intersect without mingling, until everyone’s life is disrupted by the downward mobility that comes with the rapid fall of the Thai baht in 1997.

Thai American Mai Nardone was born in Bangkok and lived there into his teen years. Now he’s come back to it, reclaiming his home. He knows his city in a way that only those who have grown up in it can, while exploring every corner of it with the perspective gained from reaching adulthood in another country, another culture. His characters soar beyond the ordinary stereotypes that a lazier writer would have allowed them to assume. Each one of them is fully capable of moving on into their own novel, while living incandescent, unforgettable lives in the form Nardone has given them in Welcome Me to the Kingdom.~Janet Brown

The Miracles of the Namiya General Store by Keigo Higashino, translated by Sam Bett (Yen One)

The Miracles of the Namiya General Store was originally published in the literary magazine Shosetsu Yasei Jidai from April of 2011 to December of the same year. The Japanese title is ナミヤ雑件店の奇跡 (Namiya Zakkaten no Kiseki) and was published in book form in 2012 by Kadokawa Corporation. It was also adapted into a feature length film in 2017.  

The year is 2012 and three good-for-nothings, Atsuya, Shota, and Kohei, end up taking refuge in an old abandoned building after their latest robbery. The sign out front shows it to be the Namiya General Store. To their surprise, while they are hiding in the building, someone drops a letter in through the mail slot. 

A notice had been floating on the Internet. It said, “From exactly midnight until daybreak, the Namiya General Store Advice Box will be reopening for one night only”. This is the same night the three delinquents break into the store. 

The boys decide to open the letter and read the contents. A woman wrote to the store asking for advice. However, the letter wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular, only to the Namiya General Store. Atsuya recalls seeing the name of the store in one of the magazines that was left in the house. He finds the page he was looking for which features a short article on the owner of the store, Yuji Namiya.

The article starts off by saying:

This neighborhood store has developed a reputation for being fully stocked with answers to life’s toughest questions. 

If you come to the Namiya General Store in XX city after hours and slip a letter through the mail slot in their shutter, an answer will be waiting for you in the milk crate around back in the morning. 

The boys become more confused because the article was written over forty years ago.—and yet people are still leaving letters and asking for advice. Since the boys had opened the letter, they feel the need to reply to it. Atsuya is worried that Kohei has left his fingerprints on the letter they wrote, but when Kohei goes to retrieve the letter, it’s no longer in the box. There’ s a noise out front which Shota goes to check on and in his hand is another letter. 

After a few more exchanges, the boys have determined that the letters have been coming from the past. They manage to narrow down the year to 1979. But they still have no idea why the house is functioning as a time machine. Following the first letter, the boys begin receiving other letters throughout the night. 

What started on a whim becomes more serious as the store continues to receive more letters. For each person who writes for advice, the boys answer to the best of their ability, in the same vein as the original owner. Their advice spawns many little miracles and intertwines with seemingly unrelated characters. It’s a night that will change their lives forever. 

Japan’s master of mystery, Keigo Higashino, has written a lighthearted fantasy that will make you laugh and cry, sometimes at the same time. In a world full of conflict, wars, and a pandemic, it is refreshing to read about miracles that will change people’s lives for the better. Just imagine what kind of advice you would give if you received a letter from the past asking for help. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Easy Life in Kamusari by Shion Miura, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (Amazon Crossing)

Yuki Hirano, a city boy born and raised in Yokohama, thought he would be a “freeter” after graduating from high school, making a living while being a part-time worker. He didn’t get good grades in school and he didn’t like studying. Because of his attitude towards academics, his parents and even his teachers never once suggested going to college to receive higher education. He was also put off by the thought of becoming a company man, working for the same company until retirement. 

Yuki already worked as a part-timer at a convenience store. He knew he couldn’t do this for the rest of his life but he didn’t have anything particular he wanted to do and didn’t expect he ever would. He thought, “after graduation, nothing would change, that my life would go right on the same as ever.”

Imagine his surprise when he is told by a certain Mr. Kumagai, that he has found Yuki a job. He thought he must be kidding, but when he gets home, he can see his mother moving a lot of her stuff into his bedroom. His mom looks at him and tells Yuki that she has already sent some clothes and other essentials he will need to Kumasari village.

So begins the tale of The Easy Life in Kamusari, the first volume in Shion Miura’s Forest Series, first published as 神去なあなあ日記 (Kamusari Naa Naa Nikki) in 2012 by Tokuma Shoten. The English version was published in 2021, and was followed the next year by Kamusari Tales Told at Night ( Asia by the Book, 2023), and is translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter. 

Yuki Hirano has no idea where Kamusari Village is. Without his knowledge, Yuki’s parents have enrolled him in a government-sponsored program called Green Employment. The idea is to “support the reemployment of people returning to their hometowns or moving to rural areas for the first time”. 

Yuki thinks if the program is willing to hire someone like him, right out of high school, it tells him how shorthanded rural communities are. Mr. Kumagai takes Yuki to the train station at Shin Yokohama station, gives him a piece of paper that tells him how to get to Kamusari Village and tells him, “You can’t come back for a year. Take care of yourself, Hirano. Hang in there.”

Yuki finds himself in a rural community in Mie Prefecture. There is no phone, no convenience stores, no Internet access, and no means of escape. He also can’t understand the Kamusari dialect and their use of “naa-naa” which could mean anything from “take it easy” to “relax” or might be a simple greeting. 

Yuki is still unsure of what kind of work he will be doing but after he makes it to Kumasari, he wakes to find himself in the home of the forest owners’ cooperative. He also learns that his first three weeks will consist of basic training—listening to lectures such as “Dangers That Lurk in the Mountain” and “Forestry Terminology”. He learns how to use a chainsaw. It finally hits him that he will be working in the forestry industry.

The more time he spends in Kamusari, the more it grows on him. He learns how to cut trees and plant saplings. He takes part in local festivals and learns more about the history and traditions of Kamusari as well. He thinks he might even be falling in love. 

It wasn’t until I was halfway through the book when I realized I saw a movie with a similar plot. I did a little research and found out the book was adapted into a movie titled Wood Job! in 2014. If I had bothered to read the subtitle of the movie, Kamusari Naa-Naa Nichijo, then I would have known the movie was based on this book. 

Miura’s coming of age story is heartwarming and lighthearted. It is an often-told story of being a “fish out of water,” with a city boy learning how to live in the country and work with nature. Miura adds a bit of the supernatural to provide a bit of tension and mystery. The setting, the folklore, the legends, the people of Kamusari, all of it will make you wish you could find a similar community to be a part of. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise by Pico Iyer (Riverhead Books)

“What kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of increasing conflict?” This is the question that prompts Pico Iyer to cast his lively mind upon finding a paradise in earth, a location that  many of us would love to find after these past three years of illness, isolation, and death. Iyer, being a tease and iconoclast, explores spots conventionally agreed upon as paradisiacal and others that few would think of in those terms. His search begins in a country that attracts few tourists, the place he claims where the idea of paradise began.

Iran is where “paradise” began. “Paradaija” is a word coined in Iran that made its way to Greece where it was stolen and transmitted to a multiplicity of languages. In the Farsi language of Iran, “garden” and “paradise” share the same word, one that is reflected in Persian gardens, “ravishing visions of paradise,” and is used generously by that country’s poets. Iyer finds a foretaste of paradise when he’s driven down “quiet country roads lined with orchards of cherries and peaches.” When he reaches his destination, the home of the Iranian equivalent to Shakespeare, his driver unexpectedly recites one of the dead poet’s famous works, declaiming “I have made the world through a paradise of words.”

It’s through words that Iyer discovers the underlying puzzle of this beautiful country. Iran, a guide tells him, invented the double-edged sword and Iyer finds that same double purpose in the enigmatic words of the Iranian people whom he talks to. This is, he decides, “a world of suggestions, not certainty.”

Moving on, he chooses North Korea, which calls itself “the people’s paradise.” Examining this, he discovers the “ruthless elimination of imperfection,” beside which the fate of humans is secondary. The urban glories of Pyongyang he dismisses as a “massive stage set,” in which the skyscrapers are “ghost towers,” unused and empty. If paradise is a surreal state, Iyer has found it here.

From there he travels to Kashmir, long acknowledged to be India’s paradise, beloved by travelers, and filled with 600,000 Indian soldiers to quell the threat of Islamic rule; to the most remote Australian town that he can find, Broome, which isn’t paradise at all but shows “a different kind of reality”  to those who aren’t its Aboriginal inhabitants; to Ladakh, where he relives his “video nights” in a mountain paradise that was once a stop on the Silk Road and still absorbs imported foreign influences that change the surface but leave the core intact; to Sri Lanka, a legendary island paradise steeped in Buddhism and racked by suicide bombers, where Hindu Tamil and Buddhist Sinhalese are locked in a bloodbath of warfare.

In the end, Iyer goes to Varanisi, saying “I was unlikely to mistake it for paradise,” even though if one dies on the banks of its filthy river, paradise in the form of moksha, the end of reincarnation and all suffering, is guaranteed. Therefore it’s a city where people come to die, with flaming corpses lying upon burning ghats in “twenty-four hour cremations”, where others purify their lives by bathing in the Ganges, a holy river that flows past thirty sewers and is clogged with fecal coliform bacteria. In this place that Iyer calls a “Boschian riddle,” a city of ideas and belief, guided by ancient customs, he remembers a teaching of a Zen master, “The struggle of your life is your paradise.”

Iyer has always been a writer of froth and charm, with brilliant observations and shallow thoughts. In The Half Known Life, he returns to cities he visited in the past and examines them with the intellect he has denied his readers in the past. This may well be the closest he will come to a biography, with his hints of his personal life—still a tease in spite of his often dazzling ideas that lurk beneath his cleverness. He’s written an invitation for all of us, to examine the struggle of our lives and discover our own paradise.~Janet Brown

Nine Lives : In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury)

William Dalrymple is a Scottish-born writer who has lived on and off in India since 1989. His first book, In Xanadu, followed the path of Marco Polo. In it he starts his journey from The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to the site of Shangdu, known more commonly as Xanadu, which is located in Inner Mongolia in China. Since then, Dalrymple has written a number of travel books focusing mostly on Asia. 

Dalrymple’s books usually focus on what he has experienced on his travels. The idea for Nine Lives came to him as he was walking up a mountain leading to the temple of Kedarnath, believed by the Hindus to be one of the homes of Lord Shiva. Dalrymple talked with many people on their pilgrimage to the temple. He met a naked and ash-smeared sadhu, one of India’s holy men. A sadhu is a religious ascetic, mendicant, or any holy person in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions. They have given up the worldly life in order to pursue and attain spiritual enlightenment.

Dalrymple was surprised by the sadhu he met, a man named Ajay Kumar Jha. Dalrymple had always assumed that most of the Holy Men he had seen in India “were from traditional village backgrounds and were motivated by a blind and simple faith”. So he asked Jha to tell him his story. Jha revealed that he had been a sales manager for an electrical company in Bombay, had received his MBA from a university and was highly regarded by his employers. 

Dalrymple met many people like Jha on his travels. With India’s rapidly growing economy and modernism, Dalrymple began to wonder what the effect of modernism had on religion. He believes that most Westerners view Eastern religions as “deep wells of ancient, unchanging wisdom”.  Dalrymple also says, “much of India’s religious identity is closely tied to specific social groups, caste practices and father-to-son lineages, all of which are changing very rapidly as Indian society transforms itself at speed”. 

Dalrymple wanted to know what does it mean to be a Holy man or a Jain nun in modern India. In this book, he features nine people with differing religious views. He introduces them by writing about how he met them, describes their practices, then asks the interviewee to tell in their own words the story of how they came to be where they’re at in this point of life. 

We are introduced to a Jain nun who is striving to reach moksha, which refers to the freedom from samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth. It is especially hard on her to stick to her vow of detachment while watching her friend slowly die by sallekhana, death by ritual fasting. The nun decides to follow the path of her friend. 

You will meet Hari Das, a dalit, previously known as an Untouchable, the lowest caste in the caste system of India.  Das works as a manual laborer during the week and a prison warden on the weekends,  but for three months, during the Theyyam season which runs from December to February, he becomes a dancer. In this form he’s possessed by a God and is respected by Brahmins, the highest caste in the Indian system. 

Each of the nine individuals' stories is different and eye-opening. As an irreligious person and a skeptic when it comes to the power of faith, I find the stories fascinating and incredible. However, I’m also respectful of other people's beliefs and practices. Listening to these people tell the stories of how they came to follow their spiritual path may open your eyes to follow your own. 

For me, although I admit to being irreligious, I do follow the Golden Rule as expressed by Luke in the New Testament (Luke 6:31),  “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  It sounds like good common sense to me. ~Ernie Hoyt