The Consul's File by Paul Theroux (Washington Square Press)

When people see or hear the name Paul Theroux, it most likely brings up images of a well-traveled man who goes on journeys and writes about his experiences. It is his travel essays where he found most of his success. His first major success was the account of his journey from Great Britain to Japan and back. The book was titled The Great Railway Bazaar and has become a classic of the travel genre. However, Theroux is a prolific writer of fiction as well. 

The Consul’s File which was published in 1977 is a collection of stories set in the fictional town of Ayer Hitam in Malaysia. The unnamed narrator is the American consul sent to the town as the United States still had an interest in the rubber estates. However, the rubber trees were being replaced by oil palms and many of the Americans had already left. It was the narrator’s job to phase out the consulate. 

We are told, “In other places the consular task was, in the State Department phrase, bridge-building; In Ayer-Hitam I was dismantling a bridge.” The narrator tells us that he was told that all he needs to know are all written in files kept in a small box-room at the Residence. He decides to write and add his own stories and stories he heard which he knows to be true to the files for posterity. 

The narrator’s secretary told him about the files so one day, the consul takes a day off and spends it at the Residence where he decides to open the box-room. There was a mystery surrounding files holding who knows what kind of secrets. What he does find is a stack of yellow papers bounded by string and partially eaten by termites. It didn’t take him long to discover “that there was little writing on them, and certainly no secrets; in fact, most of the pages were blank”.

The Consul spends two years in Ayer-Hitam and deals with a variety of people who either need his help or ask favors of him. One of the most annoying characters is a woman writer named Margaret Harbottle. She is the epitome of the entitled white American when the term wasn’t even in fashion yet. She bursts into his office as soon as it opens, she makes all sorts of demands before the Consul can even sit down. She believes it’s the Consul who should make her feel comfortable as she says she will give his name a mention in her forthcoming book. 

There is the woman anthropologist who reminds you of Conrad’s Kurtz as she goes native and marries an aboriginal chief. The woman who claims to have been raped by some oily man only to be told by one of his helpers, the person responsible was Orang Minyak, orang meaning man and minyak which means “oily, like ghee butter on his body”. He also tells the consul that Orang Minyak is a Malay spirit that only bothers women at night. 

The twenty intertwined stories gives you a feel of what it must have been like to work as a diplomat in a third world country in one of its outermost posts. The characters, both and foreign and domestic, are brought to life by Theroux’s wit and observance. It’s a shame that there are still American citizens who act like the writer who expects everything to be done for her. Visitors to other countries must remember that they are the guests and shouldn’t be making any demands just because of their nationality. ~Ernie Hoyt

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (Knopf)

“Am I even Korean anymore,” Michelle Zauner asks herself after the death of her Korean mother. She finds her answer when she goes to H Mart, the Korean supermarket chain that is found across the U.S. “I hardly speak any Korean but in H Mart it feels like I’m fluent.”

As she views the food of her childhood on the grocery shelves, Zauner’s fluency extends to her grief and she wanders the aisles in tears. In the supermarket’s food court she watches mothers feeding their children the choicest morsels of their meals and feels waves of anger when she sees women of her mother’s age and those who are older, still enjoying their food,  their lives. 

Her mother was never a “Mommy-mom,” as Zauner called the mothers of her friends. “My mother was always trying to shape me into the most perfect version of myself...Hers was tougher than tough love.” But the two of them had a common ground in food. From early childhood Zauner learned that being an adventurous eater gained her mother’s approval and happily consumed delicacies like live octopus tentacles. It took much longer to realize that the way her mother revealed her love was through the food she cooked for her daughter.

Half-Korean, Zauner and her mother make many trips to Seoul to visit family. The differences that make Zauner’s life difficult in rural Oregon become enviable assets in Korea. Her small face, the double-fold of her eyelids, and her pale skin earn her the praise of yeppeu, pretty, and the attention of a K-drama director. When she finds that her mother has discouraged what Zauner sees as her one chance at fame, she’s outraged. Her mother looks at her and tells her “You could never be anyone’s doll.”

The truth of this statement becomes clear as Zauner leaves home for the artistic life of the East Coast, independent, unconventional, and pursuing a career in music. She returns home when her mother is diagnosed with cancer and the two of them embark on an agonizing journey, in which love becomes the keynote, expressed through food. But now it’s Zauner who makes the  gifts of sustenance while her mother expresses her affection by eating as much as she is able to swallow.

After her mother’s death, Zauner opens the “kimchi fridge” and discovers instead of jars filled with pungent fermented vegetables, her mother has stocked the shelves with old family photographs. Strengthened by the memories contained in the photos, Zauner begins to make kimchi for the first time.

Food is the underpinning of Zauner’s tribute to her mother. As well as being a stunning look at pain, grief, and devotion, Crying in H Mart is a guide to the food that can be found in that supermarket, a glossary that should be carried on trips to Korean restaurants. Zauner generously names and describes the dishes her mother made for her, translating and illuminating the different forms of love that nourished her and are integral parts of her life.~Janet Brown

Red-Light Nights, Bangkok Daze : Chronicles of Sexuality Across Asia by William Sparrow (Monsoon Books)

No matter what your standards of morality are there is no denying one fact - sex sells! It’s also one of the biggest industries throughout Asia, especially Southeast Asia which is known for its sex tourism. In Red-Light Nights, Bangkok Daze, William Sparrow takes us on a journey through the underside of Asian countries, exploring their red light districts. 

Sparrow is the creator and writer and editor for his website AsianSexGazette.com. Simon Tearack, a Western journalist living in Thailand, who is also a contributor to Asian Sex Gazette (ASG) says “ASG shunned pornography and blazed a new trail: “sex journalism”, a rare attempt at honest, agenda-free coverage and analysis of actual news events linked to the sex trade and sex practices in general, on the world’s largest, most populous and most diverse continent.”

Sparrow visits the go-go bars and sex clubs in Bangkok, discusses enjo-kosai (compensated dating) and the age of consent in Japan, talks about pornography on the Internet in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, and even manages to get himself invited to Triad wedding. Sparrow also partakes in many sexual adventures, for research purposes of course, and writes about them as well. 

He admits that he had avoided going to see the sex shows in Bangkok for years because of what he unwittingly experienced when he walked into one of those types of establishments. He popped in, watched what was happening on stage, then immediately fled. To Sparrow, “there are just some things you don’t want to see being done with fruit or Ping-Pong balls. He also says, “I feel there is nothing sexy about the female vagina being used as a bottle opener.”

The chapter on Japan’s age of consent law is rather disturbing. Japan has one one of the lowest ages of consent at thirteen. However, Sparrow mentions that it is even younger in Metropolitan Tokyo, at twelve. I did my own research but could not find any information to back up his claim. However, I was informed by Japanese lawyer that twelve is indeed the age of consent in Metropolitan Tokyo, but there are all sorts of conditions that need to be met for it to be legal. 

As a longtime resident of Japan, I also want to inform other readers that the term kogyaru is not a contraction of enjo-kosai and gal (gyaru in Japanese) but refers to a fashion style. It’s a subculture where school-aged girls and young women dress in school uniforms and usually hike up the skirt so it’s very short. 

The articles are entertaining and very informative. Sparrow does his best in being objective about the sex practices of the various nations he visits. He also has a very understanding and forgiving Thai wife that lets him indulge in various “sexcapades” in pursuit of a story. I know for a fact that if I were to do the same things as Sparrow, my wife would not be understanding at all and I would be hit with a divorce form quicker than you can say “gomenasai”. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Beginner’s Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer (Vintage)

Pico Iyer, a writer who has made a literary career out of being a nomad, has been running in place for the past thirty years. The man who made his name with Video Night in Kathmandu fell in love with a woman and her country, as he described in The Lady and the Monk, and Japan has been his base ever since. 

Iyer is famous for tossing out provocative ideas and then sliding past them with deep charm, moving on to another gorgeous description, another apt anecdote. In this latest book, he relies almost exclusively on glittering statements, which lead from one to another in a way that connects but does not elucidate. Sprinkled among what he calls “Observations and Provocations” are ten essays which peripherally address the brief passages that make up the rest of the book. “Salvos,” Iyer calls them, “Much of this book may infuriate anyone who knows Japan.” It’s called a beginner’s guide, he says, because it was written by one.

His book is traditional and contemporary, mirroring both the commonplace books of the 19th century in which ideas and brief descriptions were jotted down as they came to mind, and the status updates that besiege us all on social media nowadays. But more than anything else, it takes on the form of a pointillist landscape, with each dot of the brush making a whole picture only if the viewer stands back from it and looks from a different angle.

Iyer is happily enmeshed in irony--a travel writer who spends his time at home, a fiercely literate man who neither speaks nor reads Japanese beyond the level of a very young child. He would be in danger of living within his own fantasy were it not for his highly skilled art of paying attention.

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” Simone Weil’s quote is the one Iyer has chosen as his epigraph and it guides the thoughts that follow. Like a very young child, Iyer keeps his senses completely alive to the world around him, without preconceptions to run interference and get in his way.

Within his delightful and often startling observations (18th century samurai were advised to carry powdered rouge for moments when they might be “of bad color”) are concise thoughts that may well carry truth (“My friends in Japan are less inclined to try remaking the world than simply to redecorate its corners). It’s no accident that Iyer occasionally brings to mind the cleverness of Oscar Wilde. He claims that Wilde, born the year after Peary’s ships sailed into Japan, was as shaped by Japanese influences as were Van Gogh and Manet, backing up his assertion with witticisms from Wilde that buttress Iyer’s observations of Japanese life and culture.

This book is “fan-shaped,” Iyer says, and although each statement stands on its own, they all lead to the ones that follow. Manga proceeds to the use of robots, the possibility of artificial intelligence enabling communication with the dead, and the presence of Shinto in everyday life. ”Anime is the natural expression of an animist world.” 

Speaking Japanese is useless without thinking in Japanese, Iyer says, and fluency is no guarantee of acceptance for foreigners. In fact it can be quite the opposite, as Victoria Riccardi pointed out in Untangling My Chopsticks, when she admits she had to leave Japan before she began to hate it. In his silence imposed upon him by his lack of language, Iyer begins to understand his chosen country’s apparent paradoxes: the Shinto concert where every instrument was silent, “the space between absence and presence,” the idea of emptiness as luxury. “When you leave , what will you miss most about Japan,” a friend asks and Iyer replies, “All the things you don’t have to say or explain.” 

This is the power of his deceptively simple book, the unsaid, the unexplained, lurking beneath his terse and clever bits of wit and description. Living within a riddle, Iyer says, means being unable to imagine what will happen tomorrow. It’s that unpredictability within a world of predictable ceremony, ritual, and etiquette that gives Japan--through Iyer’s eyes--a compelling and irresistible luster.~Janet Brown

Spark by Naoki Matayoshi (Pushkin Press)

Naoki Matayoshi’s debut novel 火花 (Hibana) was published in 2015 by Bungei Shuju. It’s release took the Japanese literary world by storm. The book went on to win Japan’s most prestigious award for literature - the Akutagawa Prize. The book was also adapted into a Netflix Original Series.  Matayoshi is well known in the entertainment world for being an avid reader but it still came as a surprise to everyone when he won the award. 

It is now available in English as Spark, published by Pushkin Press and translated by Alison Watts.  English readers can enjoy a story about a subject close to Matayoshi’s heart, the art of manzai. Manzai is a Japanese form of comedic dialogue, often performed by a duo, one playing the straight man while the other provides comic relief.  

The story opens as the manzai combination, Sparks, takes the stage during a summer fireworks event in Atami. The comedians were going through their routine although nobody was paying them any attention. Near the end of their routine, a loud BOOM went off signalling the start of the fireworks so the pair just went through the motions, hoping to leave the stage as quickly as possible once their allotted time was up. Another comedy duo, The Doofuses, was scheduled to take the stage and Tokunaga, the funny half of Sparks decided to stay and watch their routine. 

Tokunaga is impressed by one of the members of the Doofuses and is even more surprised when the person invites him out to drink after the show. Tokunaga discovers that Kamiya is four years older than him, making him a sempai, his senior in Japan’s hierarchical society. Tokunaga becomes his kohai or junior. Tokunaga decides right then and there to be a disciple of Kamiya. He believes Kamiya has that certain something that’s necessary to survive and succeed as a manzai artist. 

Their friendship progresses from a mere sempai-kohai relationship to becoming a bond where they can speak to each other as equals. We follow the careers of both the Sparks and the Doofuses with the Sparks becoming more popular, landing spots at various theaters and also on television shows giving them more exposure. 

After ten years in the business, Tokunaga’s partner, Yamashita, marries his girlfriend and says his wife is pregnant with twins so their manzai partnership is over. The Doofuses on the other hand don't find the same success and Kamiya would disappear for months at a time. Tokunaga continues to have faith in his senpai and believes that Kamiya is always pushing the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable and respects that.

Naoki Matayoshi knows firsthand what it’s like to be a struggling manzai artist as he is a veteran manzai-shi himself. He is the “funny man” half of Peace and performs alongside Yuji Ayabe. Armed with his knowledge of how the manzai industry works adds to the realism of the discussions Tokunaga and Kamiya have when they get together.

After winning the Akutagawa Prize, Yuji stops calling Naoki by his name and refers to him as Sensei. As a combination, Peace has gone on hiatus as Ayabe went to the U.S. to study English with the hopes of landing a role in a Hollywood film. Matayoshi continues to appear on television and continues to write as well. I find Peace’s brand of comedy quite entertaining and hope that they will perform as a duo once again in the near future. ~Ernie Hoyt

Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao, translated by Mike Fu (Bloomsbury Publishing)

Every once in a while, but not often enough, a book makes me want to meet the writer, sit and chat, become best friends. Failing that, I read whatever I can find about that author, trying to fit the jigsaw puzzle pieces of her life together to make a whole person from those fragments of information. 

This is what happened when I finished the last page of Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara. The kohl-encircled piercing stare gleaming from the determined face of a slender woman dressed in black, standing within a blurred desert street scene, gives little away.  Nor did I learn much about her background in her vivid essays where she figures prominently but usually as an observer. 

How did this young woman from Taiwan end up married to a Spaniard, living in the Sahara? Sanmao doesn’t say. She begins her book with “I desperately wanted to be the first female explorer to cross the Sahara,” but gives no clue as to how this ambition came into being. other than blaming the National Geographic. She doesn’t even say if her ambition was realized. Instead she gives vivid glimpses of life in a desert outpost, living among Sahwari villagers, with a Spanish military camp some distance away. Her husband Jose persuades her to marry him, but she does so only after exploring for three months, “running around the tents of the native nomads with my backpack and camera.” She mentions that she knew Jose in Madrid, but how they met is never divulged. The only reason why Sanmao writes about their wedding, I suspect, is because it’s great comic fodder, as is her description of setting up a household, repurposing an old tire and boards from crates that once held coffins. 

Her satirical humor is turned only upon herself and, peripherally, upon Jose. During her year in the Sahara, she is acutely aware of how her neighbors live, and she reports on this with deep respect, even when she finds the events horrifying.

Her story of the ten-year-old bride who lives next door and has become her friend, the slave who can neither hear nor speak but communicates through pantomime and gifts, the Spanish soldier who is haunted by both his slaughtered battalion and the hate he has for the tribesmen who killed them, the rebel and his lover who were destroyed by politics--all are described with compassion, along with cool, dispassionate details. Even when she tells about the night Jose was caught in a quagmire and the men whom she flags down for assistance decide to rape her instead, Sanmao is almost matter of fact in her narrative, as though this had happened to someone else. She sees no villains, simply people who exist in a different, inexplicable, and fascinating way of being, within their own world.

She is clearly in love with the desert, which she reveals in brief snapshots. Its yellow dust filling the sky during sandstorms, its pale orange light at sunrise, even its “heat that made you wish for death,” its nights of “frozen black,” all are unveiled in swift descriptions that she  sweeps tnto the fabric of her stories, making the Sahara as irresistible as the tales themselves.

Who was this woman? Born in China in 1943, raised in Taiwan, a traveler who went to 55 countries in 14 years, who studied in Madrid, Berlin, and Illinois during the 60s --she was a child whose ambition was to marry Picasso, a young woman who left home in her early twenties and returned as a celebrity (and a Spanish citizen) when she was 38, a writer who sold 15 million copies of her 15 books and gave five hundred talks to audiences numbering in the thousands in Taipei, before she hung herself with a pair of silk stockings at the age of 47.

Jose died in a diving accident when the two of them lived in the Canary Islands. Sanmao took too many pills on purpose soon after she was widowed and years later still referred to him in the present tense, while admitting “I had never been passionately in love with him. At the same time I felt incredibly lucky and at ease.” Passionate or not, how could she resist a man who gave her a camel skull, complete with teeth, as a wedding gift? Passionate pales next to the love and understanding that comes with a present like that. Living without the man who had loved her from the time he was sixteen, who told the woman eight years older than he that he would marry her when he grew up, must have stripped much of the color from Sanmao’s life. She continued to write but “her later pieces are all veiled in melancholy.”

“Solipsistic,” a Chinese-American writer said of Sanmao in the New Yorker, “...myopic, not truly curious.”  If this is true, it was certainly lost in translation. Sanmao’s life was her art, and her beam of curiosity was laser sharp, at least as it’s conveyed by Mike Fu’s English interpretation from the original Chinese. We should be all be as myopic as this woman of many names--Sanmao. Echo Ping Chen, Chen Maoping--who lived a life of stories and offered them up with relish and charm.~Janet Brown

Born Into Brothels by Zana Briski (Umbrage)

“The most stigmatized people in Calcutta’s red light district, are not the prostitutes, but their children. In the face of abject poverty, abuse, and despair, these kids have little possibility of escaping their mother’s fate or for creating another type of life.”  ~Diane Weyerman

Zana Briski is a British photographer who went to India in 1995 and wasn’t sure what direction her life was going to take. She was taking pictures of the “harsh realities of women’s lives - female infanticide, child marriage, dowry deaths, and widowhood”. It wasn’t until a friend took her to the red light district in Calcutta where she finally found her reason for being. 

It took months for Briski to penetrate the tight-knit community of prostitutes and even longer for the workers to open up to her. Her persistence and patience paid off, although it was the children of the prostitutes that took to her right away. They were fascinated by the foreign woman and her cameras. She showed them how to use the cameras and let the kids take the pictures. That gives her an idea for her next trip to India. 

Briski spends the next few years fund-raising and generating support for her project. She asks for help from one of her colleagues who at first refuses but after she sends him video footage that she took and explained her idea, he was on the next plane to India. 

Briski returns to India with ten easy-to-use cameras and begins teaching a photography class for the kids. This then gives her the idea of recording the kids progress. Together with Ross Kaufman, they make a documentary film titled Born Into Brothels which is also the title to this companion book. The book includes the subtitle Photographs by the Children of Calcutta. The film was shown at the annual Sundance Film Festival and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2005. 

The pictures in this book “are taken by children of prostitutes, children who have grown up surrounded by violence and clouded by a social stigma that denies them a right to an education”. The cameras “become windows to a new world” and for some, “a door to a new life”. 

We are introduced to eight of Briski’s brightest students - Avijit, Gour, Kochi, Manik, Puja, Shanti, Suchitra, and Tapasi. They range in age from ten to fourteen. Briski gives these children an opportunity to improve their lives through the use of photography and cameras. The vivid portraits compiled in this book are by these children and are the vision of India. It gives us a glimpse into the “real” India. 

Some of the kids are afraid of leaving their homes so their pictures are limited to their family, friends, and living accommodations. Others are more adventurous as they go out into the city to take pictures of whatever interests them. 

Thanks to the success of the film and support from people around the world, Briski sets up a non-profit organization named Kids with Cameras. The organization continues to teach impoverished and marginalized children the art of photography. It “builds platforms for the children to exhibit their work, telling us their stories and transforming the children and their audience through the processes of instruction, creation, and experience.” 

The pictures you see may change any bias you may have had about India and its people. The young photographers and many of their subjects are seen smiling. These images provoke one of the strongest human emotions - hope! ~Ernie Hoyt

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (Grand Central Publishers, Hachette Book Group)

Several years ago, I spent an excruciating afternoon in a Shenzhen historical museum. A newly born city, Shenzhen took on the entire Pearl River Delta region in its exhibits and focused heavily upon the opium trade that enriched the West and the Treaty Ports that humiliated the Chinese. This area of the museum was the most heavily laden with signs in English and as I read about the harsh and discriminatory treatment by Western countries toward the people whose country they forcibly occupied, I grew hot with national guilt. When I finally reached the area devoted to the cruelty of the Japanese invasion during World War Two, I almost cheered with relief at encountering a villain who wasn’t a flower of Anglo-European civilization, an ignoble reaction but a human one. Deflect that guilt.

I had that response again as I read Pachinko, a novel that spans the relationship between the Japanese and the Koreans throughout the 20th century, beginning with Japan’s colonization of Korea and ending with the discrimination faced by Koreans whose families had lived for generations in Japan. Horrifying as this was, it evoked the same deflection: See. We aren’t the only ones.

Min Jin Lee has encapsulated this history of humiliation within a compelling family saga. A country girl from a Korean fishing village, married to a Christian minister from Pyongyang, is taken by her new husband to Osaka where he becomes a missionary. The two of them quickly learn that Koreans in Japan have no foothold within the country that rules over their own. Crammed into a ghetto where the housing is shacks built from scrap material because the Japanese refuse to rent to Koreans, the young couple do their best to live up to the advice the husband was given--be perfect. Even so, the young minister is imprisoned under a political protest and returns to his family only to die. His wife becomes a street vendor to ensure her children’s survival, and his sons are tormented in school by their Japanese classmates. 

An indiscretion in the wife’s past gives her an unlikely protector, a Korean who has risen in the Osaka underworld.  His care extends to her children and he keeps the family alive throughout World War Two. But not even his influence can erase the truth that the Japanese-born Korean boys will succeed in the country of their birth only if they deny their bloodline or if they become involved in the shadow economy of Pachinko, the pinball machine parlors that have spread across Japan.

In the family’s second Japanese-born generation, a son rises through education, finds success in America, and returns to Tokyo with a job in international finance that brings comfort beyond anything his grandmother has ever known. He soon discovers he’s a kind of freak, neither Western nor Japanese nor Korean. His roots are in pachinko, with its undertones of yakuza gangsters, and these roots run deep.

Lee brings stark and vivid details to her characters: the ink still visible under a child’s fingernails, when he appears on his birthday for an annual interrogation and fingerprinting at an immigration office in the only country he’s ever lived in, clutching his Korean passport and haunted by the threat of deportation; the odor of homemade kimchi that clings to the clothes of little boys who are singled out and bullied because they are different; the disbelief evoked by the Korean-American girl when she tells the women of her boyfriend’s family that she’s only eaten Korean food in restaurants because her own mother never cooked it at home.

Pachinko’s story of closeness and rejection, of success and disgrace, of being disregarded in a country of birth as well as in a country of origin, brings a little-known history into the light, illuminating a disgrace that is mirrored in countries all over the world. After reading it, we know we’re not alone in our crimes of colonization and exploitation, a knowledge that does nothing to mitigate our own failures. ~Janet Brown

The Red Thread by Nicholas Jose (Hardie Grant Books)

In Chinese legend, the Red Thread, also known as the red thread of fate or red thread of destiny, is “an invisible thread said to tie together all those whose lives will intertwine”. It is similar to the Western idea of a soulmate. In Nicholas Jose’s The Red Thread, Jose takes a known legend from the past and blends it with present day romance in Shanghai. 

Shen works at an auction house called Shanghai Art Auctions International. One of his regular suppliers has brought him some new items - a small figurine of a woman from the Ming Dynasty, a bowl with the mark of the Quianlong Emperor, and finally a book that was “bound traditionally in several loose stitchings that were sandwiched between red cloth boards and fastened with red silk ribbons, two on each side”. 

It was the earliest printings of a book titled Six Chapters of a Floating Life, except the supplier only had four of the chapters in his possession. The supplier says the name of the writer is Shen Fu, written in the same character as Shen’s name. Shen feels the book drawing him in but it is to be put up for auction along with the other two items. 

Shen takes the book home and starts to read it. On the day of the auction, when Lot No.41 comes up, the book by Shen-Fu, Shen decides then and there to withdraw the item from sale. It is also at the auction where he sees Ruth for the first time. 

Ruth is an Australian artist who makes contemporary traditional Chinese paintings. She left invitations to her own show at a gallery. Shen and Shen’s co-worker Ricky go to the show although Shen is not really interested in contemporary art. He is more interested in reading Shen Fu’s account of his life. 

At Ruth’s show, when he hears her say “When mosquitoes were humming around in summer, I transformed them in my imagination into a company of storks dancing in the air.”. These were the exact words that were written in Shen Fu’s Six Chapters of a Floating Life. The more Shen reads the book, he realizes that he and Ruth are living the life as described in the book. 

Their lives become more complicated when Han, a beautiful woman, enters their lives. In Shen Fu’s book, Shen and his lover are also mesmerized by a woman who comes into their lives and turns things upside down. Shen begins to believe that the reason nobody has ever found the last two chapters is because he and Ruth are living the life that was written in the book. 

The Red Thread is one of those stories that blends historical fact with fiction. Shen Fu was a writer in the Qing Dynasty and did write his autobiography and titled it Six Records of a Floating Life. It is also true that the last two chapters have never been found. Jose weaves a wonderful romance story of how strong the bond of true love can be. It makes you want to believe in fate and in finding your true soulmate. ~Ernie Hoyt