Activities of Daily Living by Lisa Hsiao Chen (W.W. Norton & Company)

Activities of daily living are how acuity and independence are measured in aging people. Can they manage their money, shop for groceries, do laundry? The list becomes more basic as time goes on. Can they bathe without help, get dressed in the morning, feed themselves three times a day? Are they able to go to the toilet alone? Do they know where they are? Can they recognize familiar faces?

It’s a heartbreaking litany of questions that Alice and her sister Amy ask themselves as the man they call The Father, whom  their mother married after her first husband abandoned his family,  loses his ability to do these things, gradually but with an alarming speed. Six months earlier he lived alone in the way he wanted, with “his standard meals of Fritos and pork rinds confettied with peanuts,” a bottle of Jim Beam, and two packs of cigarettes a day, sitting in front of his television watching Netflix.  In spite of this sustained physical abuse, “his lungs remained pink, his blood pressure and cholesterol levels normal. Just like they were now.” It’s The Father’s mind that’s shutting down. Eventually he’ll forget to breathe, just as he no longer remembers how to perform any other activity of daily living.

When Alice goes to The Father’s house, she’s surprised to discover he had been a man with projects. Old cameras and stacks of photographs, pieces of classical Chinese furniture that he has taught himself to build, a library of cookbooks: all bear testimony to an active mind which is lapsing into torpor. “Come on, brain,” Alice overhears The Father saying as he struggles to put on a pair of pants. 

Alice believes in projects. She lives in a community of artists and when they ask her what she's been up to, she tells them she’s working on a project, although it doesn’t yet exist outside of her head. Within her head she’s obsessed with a performance artist, a man who came to America from Taiwan as Alice, her mother, and sister did. 

Tehching Hsieh is bored with the activities of daily living, although his own are complicated by his status as an illegal alien. For Hsieh time is plastic, a substance to be molded in surreal ways. He selects the expanse of a year to spend or to waste in a matter of his own choosing, in enigmatic versions of his own daily activities. 

One year he builds a cage in his studio and lives in it for 365 days,  never leaving it, without speaking, reading,  writing or being amused by a radio or a television. A friend comes every day bringing food and removing his body waste. During this time he allows four showings, one for each season of the year. He follows this by putting a time clock in his studio and punching it every hour, on the hour, from  one April to the next, for a total of 8,627 punches. Twelve alarm clocks woke him every hour for a year, during which he missed only 133 punches of the clock. A few months after this piece, he lives outdoors with only a sleeping bag as shelter for a year that includes one of the coldest winters ever recorded in New York. The hardest part, Hsieh said, was staying clean; his hands became encrusted with dirt. His next piece involves another person, the artist Linda Montano to whom he is tethered by an 8-foot rope for a year, without ever touching each other. Only in sleep do the couple find privacy. Montano later admitted this piece was “dangerous emotionally.” As Hsieh said, they became each other’s cage.

Alice steeps herself in records of these pieces. She manages to find where Hsieh lives, not far from her own Brooklyn apartment. She spots him in a local supermarket and follows him to Italy where he represents Taiwan in the Venice Bienniale. She never speaks to him but his work becomes her life. 

“What is important for me is passing time, not how to pass time,” Hsieh has told interviewers. By making him her project, Alice passes time without needing to wonder how or why this is happening. But then The Father becomes the project and passing time takes on an unfamiliar urgency. 

Lisa Hsiao Chen uses the form known as autofiction and makes it a work of performance art. There is no plot and no resolution. Although The Father’s decline is the pivot point of the novel, it doesn’t provide a narrative arc. Neither does Tehching Hsieh, a living artist who exists outside of fiction, whose final performance was thirteen years of making no art at all. https://www.tehchinghsieh.net/ Nor does Alice, who ends the book with a single question: “Will there be another project?”

Although this novel floats like a dream drifting through a heavy mist, it’s weighted with the unspoken questions that lie below its surface. Chen is a writer who catches ordinary life and places it in sentences of amazing beauty--”It was late spring; the days molted with gold.” She explores ideas of time and mortality through glimpses of Simone de Beauvoir and Henri Bergson. She investigates the amorphous nature of friendship in modern kinetic lives. She offers up hundreds of thoughts that are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, leaving it to her readers to assemble them into a whole that will make personal sense for each one of them. She's written a book that might never have been written before. Read it.~Janet Brown

Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura, translated by Phlip Gabriel (Penguin)

Mizuki Tsujimura is well known in Japan as a mystery writer. However, her novel Lonely Castle in the Mirror has elements of fantasy and science-fiction in it. It centers on seven junior high school students who wake up one morning to find the mirrors in their rooms are casting a shiny light. As they touch the surface, they are pulled into the mirror and find themselves in a beautiful castle. There they meet each other for the first time, and are greeted by a little girl wearing a wolf’s mask who calls herself the Wolf Queen. Although none of the students are aware of it yet, they all have one thing in common. 

Originally published in the Japanese language as かがみの孤城 (Kagami no Kojo) in 2017 by Poplar Publishing, it was adapted into a manga by Tomo Taketomi and serialized in Shueisha’s Seinen Magazine from June 2019 to February 2022. The manga has also been published as a five-volume series. The book was adapted into an animation film and released in December of 2022. 

The English version is translated by Phlip Gabriel, an American translator and Japanologist, who is also known for translating a number of works by Haruki Murakami. Although Gabriel is an American, the first English publication of this book was published by Penguin Random House UK and therefore the book is written in British English. 

Kokoro is a student in her first year of Yukishina No.5 Junior High School. However, after her first month there, she has stopped going to school. A couple of days ago, she and her mother went to check out a private alternative-learning school. Kokoro thought she may be able to make a fresh start there but on the day she is to go, she has a severe stomachache and knows she isn’t going to make it in this new place.

As you delve deeper into the story, it becomes clear why Kokoro stopped going to school. She would not admit it to herself but she was being bullied, or to put it lightly, she was shunned and ignored which is still a form of bullying. After a particular incident, she made a drastic decision—she stopped going to school. 

It is when she’s alone in her room that the mirror shines. The first time she stepped through and met the Wolf Queen, she just ran away. The following day when the mirror is shining again, she takes the initiative to go back in. There she meets six other people who seem to be around her age, named Aki, Rion, Subaru, Fuka, Masamune, and Ureshino.

What they find that they have in common is they all stopped going to school. Later, they even find out they all went to the same junior high school and they all have their own issues. 

The Wolf Queen who gathered them together tells them they’re all in a castle which can grant them a wish. She tells them, “Deep inside this castle is a room none of you is permitted to enter. It is a Wishing Room. Only one person will actually have access. Only one of you will have your wish come true. One Little Red Riding Hood.”

The students don’t understand what the Wolf Queen means by calling them ‘Little Red Hood”. She says, “You are the lost Little Red Hoods”, and continues to tell them, “from now until next March, you will need to search for the key that unlocks the Wishing Room. The person who finds it will have the right to enter and their wish will be granted.”

Mizuki Tsujimura’s novel is a fantastical tale of overcoming your fears, working together, becoming self-confident, and having empathy for others. Not only does she hit upon the subject of bullying, but she also deals with abuse, neglect, social withdrawal, and other issues facing teens today, not only in Japan, but throughout the world in general. 

At times heartbreaking but very inspirational, this book will make you think back to the times when perhaps you were considered “different” at school and shared the same trauma as these seven students, but you will also feel compassion for how they were able to overcome their fears. You will care for the characters, you will be pulled into their world, and you will be thinking about his book long after you have finished it. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Scent of Sake by Joyce Lebra (Avon)

“She was taught to submit, to obey… but she dreamed of an empire.” 

Rie is a nineteen-year-old woman who’s the heir to the House of Omura, a sake brewing family in Kobe. As a young girl, Rie loved the yeasty smell of brewing sake. However, sake brewing is a man’s job. Women aren’t allowed in the kura where the sake was made. 

“Let a woman enter the brewery and the sake will sour”, the old ones always said. It was a warning her mother often repeated since Rie was a child. It’s the women’s duty to scrub out the sake barrels though and Rie always tries to clean them as near to the kura as she could get. Not once has the sake gone sour. 

The Scent of Sake is a family epic that spans generations and focuses on a woman who has been told she could never be the head of the House of Omura, simply because of her gender. Now that she is of marriageable age, her mother has found a husband for her. She knew her parents are expecting her to continue the line of Kinzaemon, the patriarch of the family. Her father is Kinzaemon IX. 

In feudal Japan, everyone knowsthat brewing sake is exclusively a man’s world. Rie continues to feel the guilt for having taken her eyes off her younger brother Toichi when she was eight years old. She thought if she had been more careful, he would not have fallen into the well. Now, Rie is the oldest and sole heir to the empire. 

Rie’s father could have brought in the son of a geisha but as with all the merchants of the Kansai area, he prefers a mukoyoshi which means to adopt a husband for his daughter. Rie’s mother, Hana, has found a good match with Jihei, the son of another brewing family. 

Unfortunately, Jihei has no head for business. He spends most of his time either drinking or hanging out with geishas. Although Rie is repulsed by the man, she knows it’s in her family’s interest to get pregnant and bear an heir. 

Rie does get pregnant but has a miscarriage. She also learns that her husband, Jihei, has had a son with a geisha. Her parents tell her that she has no choice but to bring the child into the Omura house so he will become the heir to the dynasty. So now Rie has to raise a child that isn’t her own. 

For Rie, it’s one tragedy after another but she has a plan of her own. She secretly meets with a man she fancies, who also fancies her and they have a tryst. She times everything so that Jihei will think it is his child she is carrying when she gets pregnant again, but she has a girl. 

Everything Rie does, she does for the House. She takes her mother’s advice to heart and has to “kill the self” in order to survive. She refuses to relinquish the power to her husband or to his son. The family stamp remains in her possession. Even after her parents die, it is Rie who holds the real power in the House of Omura. 

Joyce Lebra weaves a story that could be adapted into a taiga drama on NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Company. Taiga dramas are a series that focuses on a historical figure and based on historical facts. She thoroughly researched the history of sake making, speaking with different brewers from Akita and Niigata in the north to Kyushu in the south. The story is enough to make you want to imbibe. ~Ernie Hoyt

Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea by Rita Chang-Eppig (Bloomsbury Publishing)

Shek Yeung is a girl who has been drawn to the sea from her earliest years and her determination to sail with her father and brother leads to an unforeseen destiny. When their boat is captured by pirates, Shek Yeung is sold into prostitution. Her brains, as much as her beauty, attracts a man who has united the pirates of the South China Sea into a fleet that defies the Emperor’s navy. She becomes Cheng Yat’s wife, his partner in battle, and his chief advisor. With his death, she pragmatically assesses the situation and allies herself with her husband’s adopted son, whom she soon marries. Together Shek Yeung and Cheung Po outwit the ships of the English, Portuguese, and the Dutch, as well as warships sent by the Emperor. 

A bodice-ripping romance novel? Not at all. Any torn bodices have been ripped in the distant past and are quickly glossed over. Sex, for all that it is instrumental in Shek Yeung’s destiny, is not a major player in her story—nor is romance. She’s not a woman who has time for that. She has a unified fleet of pirate ships to manage. 

Shek Yeung has one entity in her life to whom she pays respect, the deity Ma-Zou, who protects and offers counsel to those who spend their lives on the sea. Ma-Zou takes many different forms and is enshrined in different legends, some of them providing a counterpoint to Shek Yeung’s own story. But while Ma-Zou is a supernatural being who lives in myth and religion, Shek Yeung is rooted in Chinese history, a dominant figure who ruled China’s seas from 1801 to 1810 and who died under unusual circumstances for a pirate—peacefully, of old age.

She and her second husband controlled a naval empire of five different fleets, each bearing a different colored banner. She and Cheung Po sailed on the Red Banner fleet, 300 ships that scourged the sea from Vietnam to Canton. The Black Banner fleet with 200 ships controlled the waters near the Pearl River Delta, while the Green and Red Banner fleets, with 100 and 50 ships respectively, held sway over the Yangtze River Delta. Taiwan’s seacoast was the province of the Blue Banner Fleet with 150 ships.  Aboard these vessels were 40,000-60,000 pirates, all owing allegiance to Shek Yeung and Cheung Po.

Each pirate carried the weapon of their native regions which were all developed for hand-to-hand combat: cutlasses, double-edged swords, axes, crossbows that fired three arrows at a time, maces, and the multi-pointed tiger-head hook swords. Gunpowder got the pirates onto the ships that were their prey, but once they were aboard, courage and skill were the tools of their blood-soaked trade. 

Rita Chang-Eppig’s research is a primary strength of her novel. Although she has given Shek Yeung details that weren’t part of her history, she gives her a firm position as a redoubtable strategist and warrior. Poor Cheung Po turns ashen in contrast--somewhat henpecked and quite unloved. And although Chang-Eppig pays homage to Ma-Zou in her acknowledgments, as well she should, she never mentions that Shek Yeung existed outside of the author’s creative imagination. 

This is perhaps a deficiency of the advance reader’s edition. When Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea comes to bookstores in its finished form, it will garner more readers if it acknowledges that Shek Yeung once lived, breathed, and ruled as a compelling and factual figure in Chinese history.~Janet Brown

Life Ceremony : Stories by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Granta)

Sayaka Murata, author of Convenience Store Woman (Asia by the Book, March 2018) and Earthlings is back. Life Ceremony is her latest book to be published in English and is a collection of thirteen short stories. First published in Japan in 2019 with the title 生命式 (Semei Shiki) by Kawade Shobo Shinsha, the English version is translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori who has also translated books by Ryu Murakami, Miyuki Miyabe, and Kyoka Nakajima.

The lead story, A First Rate Material, centers on a woman named Nana who is about to be married. She is meeting with a couple of girlfriends when one of them notices the sweater and asks her if it’s made of human hair. Nana is delighted that her girlfriend noticed. Yes, in today’s society, items made from human materials are the norm, a form of status—wedding rings made from front teeth, furniture made from human bones. But her fiance is adverse to anything made from human materials. How can she convince him that it’s the fashion now?

A Magnificent Spread focuses on the eating habits of different families. Kumi’s older sister and her husband only eat food they buy online from Happy Future Foods. When Kumi was in junior high school, she told her sister that she was a warrior in a previous life in the magical city of Dundilas and only ate the magical food from that magical kingdom. But now her fiance Keiichi wants her to make her own food for him and his parents. Keiichi only wants to prove his point, saying to everyone, “Everyone thinks the food other people eat are disgusting, and they refuse to eat it. And that’s the way it should be, as far as I’m concerned”. 

The story and namesake of the book Life Ceremony is another fascinating look into what the future holds when someone passes away. When Maho was little, it was forbidden to eat human flesh. She was even reprimanded for making a joke about eating a human. But since then, “the human race has changed little by little.” The population sharply shrank and people fear that the human race would become extinct. This had the “effect  of procreation morphing into a form of social justice”. Sex becomes known as insemination with the goal being to create new life. When people die, it’s the custom to have a “life ceremony” instead of a funeral. “Guests at a life ceremony would eat the deceased’s body, and also seek an insemination partner.” It is based on the idea of “birthing life from death”. 

Sayaka Murata is definitely a rising star in Japan’s literary world. Her first novel Jyunyu (Breastfeeding) won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 2003. She has also won the Yukio Mishima Prize in 2013 for her novel Shiro-iro no machi no, sono hone no taion no (Of Bones, Of Body Heat, Of Whitening City) and in 2016,  her tenth novel, Konbini Ningen (Convenience Store Woman) won the prestigious Akutagawa Award. 

She continues to write about subjects considered taboo in Japanese society, such as sexuality, incest, cannibalism, and LGBTQ issues. It is no easy task to sum up the stories in Life Ceremony. Some of the words I would use to describe the stories are quirky and bizarre. You will laugh, you will cry, you may even become a little nauseated at times. However, every story will make you think about it long after you have finished reading this book. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Loyal Character Dancer by Qiu Xiaolong (Soho Crime)

Inspector Chen Cao is a member of the Shanghai Police Bureau who likes to spend his mornings reading Chinese poetry in the Bund Park. However, on this occasion, he is approached by a senior park security officer who leads him to a dead and mutilated body, dressed in his pajamas. 

So begins Qiu Xiaolong’s novel A Loyal Character Dancer. It is a sequel to Xiaolong’s debut novel, Death of a Red Heroine (Asia by the Book, November 2023) and features a rising star in China’s politically complicated government —Chief Inspector Chen Cao. 

Inspector Chen is soon joined by his assistant, Detective Yu Guangming who takes pictures of the victim and tells his boss that it was Triad killing, the Triads being a secret society originating in China that’s usually involved in organized crime. 

Forensics determine the man was killed by eighteen blows from axes. Chen and Yu also determine that the body was left in the park so it would easily be found. The only question is why. Detective Yu suggests that it may be a warning—but to who and why remains a mystery.

Inspector Chen is then summoned to his superior’s office, Party Secretary Li Guohua. Guohua is not only Chen’s superior but his mentor as well. The Party Secretary tells him, “The Party has always thought highly of you, so this is a job for you, Chief Inspector Chen, for you alone.”

Chen is surprised that Party Secretary Li was already informed about the murder victim found in the Bund Park.  But then Party Secretary Li shows Inspector Chen a picture of an American woman and tells him she is Inspector Catherine Rohn, a representative of the U.S. Marshals Service. Inspector Rohn is in China to escort a woman named Wen Liping back to the United States. Inspector Chen’s job is to help her accomplish this mission. 

Inspector Chen has no idea who Wen Liping is or who her husband, Feng Dexiang, is. A major triad leader named Jia Xinzhi, has been arrested in New York. He is allegedly involved in a number of criminal activities, including people smuggling. The only one who can testify against him is Feng Dexiang. However he will only do so if his wife is brought to the U.S. from China. 

Chen believes this assignment is more of a show to the U.S. Government and is not really interested in babysitting a U.S. Marshall, although Catherine Rohn will be a guest of the nation of China. It appears to be a simple job which Inspector Chen hopes to finish before focusing on the murder victim found in the Bund Park. 

Unfortunately for Chen, things go awry even before Inspector Rohn comes to China. Wen Liping has gone missing and nobody knows her whereabouts. The only information the police are given is that she received a phone call from Feng who told her that her life is in danger and she should escape while she still has a chance. 

Qiu Xiaolong weaves an intricate tale of organized crime, political corruption, and international cooperation between Communist China and the democracy of the United States. Inspector Chen is a key figure as he must find a balance to help an American and still remain a loyal Party member. 

Will Inspector Chen find Wen Liping before Inspector Rohn gets to China? Will he enlist her help if he doesn’t? And what is the mystery of the dead man in the park? All these questions will be answered and will make the reader look forward to the next Inspector Chen adventure. ~Ernie Hoyt

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, translated by Eric Ozawa (Harper Perennial)

Takako is in love, a blissful state that lasts for a year, until the day her boyfriend tells her he’s getting married. Worse yet, he’s been with his fiancee for twice as long as he’s been dating Takako. Making this scenario completely disastrous is the fact that Takako works with the man who’s just dumped her--but not completely. “You know, we can still see each other sometimes,” he tells her magnanimously.

Engulfed in grief, Takako leaves her job and goes into hibernation, “drifting all alone through outer space.” After a month of misery, she gets a phone call from an uncle she hasn’t seen in years, a man who owns a small used bookstore and needs an assistant. The offer comes with a place to live, a room above the shop.

Takako is running out of money. Faced with living in a Tokyo bookshop or returning home where her mother will speedily arrange a marriage for her, she accepts her uncle’s offer. 

Immediately struck by the musty smell of old paper and the staggering number of old books that have even encroached upon the room that’s meant to be hers, Takako is less than charmed with this new living arrangement. She’s never been a reader and the smell of the shop is overwhelming. “Try to imagine it as the dampness after a morning rain,” her uncle suggests but the mustiness even pervades her futon while the looming presence of books disturbs her sleep. One night she picks up a volume, hoping it will bore her into somnolence. Instead she stays up almost until dawn, ensnared by Until the Death of the Girl by Sasei Muro. From that point on, the bookshop becomes a paradise of possibility and Takako turns into an ardent reader.

Quickly Satoshi Yagisawa throws his readers into four different love stories: Takako’s heartbreak, her uncle’s devotion to the wife who has deserted him, the young server at a coffee shop who is desperately besotted with his coworker, and Takako’s gradual attraction to a bookshop customer who chats with her over coffee. The most irresistible love, however, is the one Takako develops for books, the bookshop, and the street where it’s located. Yasukuni Street is an avenue filled with bookshops that have been selling secondhand books since the end of the nineteenth century. Since each shop specializes in a different field of interest, they coexist in a friendly manner in what Takako’s uncle claims is “the largest concentration of secondhand bookshops in the world.”

This, translator Eric Ozawa says in his Translator’s Note, isn’t fiction. Yagisawa has set his Morisaki Bookshop in central Tokyo’s Jimbocho District, a neighborhood that holds anywhere from 150 to 180 bookshops, each with its own specialty. 

No wonder Takako becomes a bibliophile. She lives in an area where books are the reason for its existence, with everyone on its streets browsing, buying, and discussing books, breathing in their odor that her uncle likens to petrichor. “The whole place,” Takako comes to realize, “felt like the setting for an adventure.”

Within this setting, the different love stories are burnished with a sweetness that never becomes cloying. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop is both comforting and restorative, in a world of overstuffed novels and gloomy appraisals of the current condition.  This slender little novella has been translated into fifteen different languages since  its Japanese debut in 2010. Charming without being overly whimsical and firmly rooted in fact, not fantasy, this is a book that book lovers will buy for their friends while being sure to keep one for themselves.~Janet Brown

Agent Storm : My Life Inside Al Qaeda by Mortem Storm (Penguin Viking)

Agent Storm is the fascinating story of the double life that Mortem Storm led until breaking his silence with the news media after one too many broken promises by the various agencies. Mortem Storm writes an eloquent story of how he went from becoming a radical islamist, then becomes disillusioned with their ideology, and finally finds himself working as a double agent for PET (the Danish Secret Service) as Storm is a Danish citizen, MI5, Mi6, and also the CIA. It comes as no surprise that not one of the Western intelligence was willing to go on record to confirm or deny their participation in the events Storm talks about. 

Many people may doubt the truth of his story but Storm includes copies of E-mails he exchanged with Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-Yemini imam who also had ties to Al Qaeda, videos of a Croatian woman who wanted to marry the cleric, a number of encrypted mails from jihadists in Yemen and Somalia, records of money transfers to Somalia, text messages to the Danish secret police, and secret recordings he made with the various government agencies.

Storm takes us back to his beginnings in a town called Korsor in Denmark. His father was an alcoholic who deserted the family when Storm was still a child. He then was abused by his step-father, became friends with his Arab neighbors in his apartment complex, and committed his first robbery when he was only thirteen. 

As he grew older, he became a member of the Bandidos, a notorious biker gang known for committing acts of violence, hardcore partying, drining, using and selling drugs, and other illegal activities. However, after beating a man with a baseball bat, he couldn’t get the moans of the man out of his head. He began to wonder what purpose his life had. It was around this time that he found himself in a library and began to read the story of the life of the Prophet Mohammad. This would change his life.

Storm was still partying even after officially converting to Islam at the age of nineteen, even changing his name from Morten to Murad. After being arrested for the umpteenth time, he met a Danish Islam convert named Sulaiman while they wee both in custody. After his release, he moves to England with Sulaiman, begins to pray five times a day, and grows a beard. He goes to the Regent’s Park Mosque and is offered a scholarship to study Arabic and Islam at a school in Yemen. He marries a Muslim woman and even names his son Osama, after the top leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden. 

He returns to Britain more radicalized than ever. In London, he meets Anwar al-Awlaki, who at one time was considered the number two man in Al Qaeda, after Osama bin Laden. His friendship with al-Awlaki leads him to befriend other like-minded jihadists. Over a ten year period, Storm would become involved in a network with jihadists in Britain, Denmark, Yemen, and Somalia. Storm is so impassioned to fight for the cause of Islam, he’s willing to go to Somalia and help the Somali jihadists to fight the mostly Chrstian Ethiopian army. He bought a one-way ticket to Mogadishu but before leaving, he’s told by one of his comrades not to come. 

The defeatism of some of his Muslim brothers begin to make him question the Koran. The more that doubts creep into his mind, the more he feels he’s wasted ten years of his life. He begins to think that perhaps his belief in Islam was flawed or was being distorted by men like al-Awlaki. After a lot of soul-searching, Storm makes another life-changing decision—he contacts a man who once gave him his business card after he became “a citizen of interest.” The man is a member of the Danish secret police. 

And so begins his life as an informant. The intelligence Storm provides for the various agencies eventually leads to the involvement of the U.S. government-sanctioned assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki which was approved by President Barack Obama. In most news pieces, the U.S. took credit for dispatching one of the world’s most dangerous men from this earth but according to Storm, it is his intelligence and sources that helped the U.S. government. Of course the U.S. continues to remain silent on this particular point. 

If you are intrigued by international espionage, counter-terrorism, and the goal of making this world a safer place, forget James Bond and Modesty Blaise. You will be happy to know there was someone like Agent Storm to keep the world safe from terrorists. ~Ernie Hoyt

Chinese Prodigal by David Shih (Atlantic Monthly Press)

David Shih’s Chinese Prodigal extends an open invitation to rummage through a well-furnished mind, in the same way readers might root through their grandmother’s attic. Moving from one essay to the next is like opening a box, heavy, intriguing and filled with valuable items that seem to have little to do with what was unearthed earlier.

“After years of sharing my ideas with students,” Professor Shih says in a lengthy introduction, “I wanted to try to write them down to see if I could do it.” That he does, presenting many ideas with James Baldwin’s goal in mind; “...to write a sentence as clean as a bone.”  

His sentences are clean bones searching for their skeleton. Shih is a good writer whose words frequently have the clear ring of aphorisms, and his ideas are provocative and mind-expanding. What they lack is a solid frame to bring them into a cohesive whole. 

Shih echoes the quest of Cheuk Kwan in Have You Eaten Yet? (Asia by the Book, March 2023) in separating race from ethnicity. Unlike Kwan however, he has lived almost all of his life in a country where race is poorly delineated and ethnicities shift positions, depending on what the dominant race wants them to represent. “Asian” as the name of a race in America simply means not black and not white, a liquid category that swings between “model minority” and “yellow peril” with scant reason for either stereotype. Within that racial construct, individual ethnicities also rocket between class markers, with Chinese and Japanese vying for top of the list and Southeast Asians working their way up from the bottom. 

Shih’s father has no illusions about the U.S. A man who has worked hard to achieve “an honest lifetime,” he has accepted racism as an established American truth, telling his children : “Chinese people will always be second-class citizens in this country.” He refuses to let his children learn Chinese, wanting them to speak English without any trace of an accent and he chooses the name “Frederick” as his own English name because he’s able to  pronounce it correctly. His offspring’s achievements give them a place in the white world that they gained through the mastery of English that he had insisted upon, although, Shih says, “language, like blood, can make a family.” The gift of fluency has given them a tool that is superior to their father’s  command of the language and this weakens the power of his patriarchy.

Shih’s portrait of his father is the highlight of his book. Through uncovering this man, he lets his own private thoughts escape. When he tells how his father’s favorite grandchild was Shih’s son, a boy who strongly resembles his white mother, this leads him into a discussion of being a Chinese father to a biracial child. He examines the “ethical dimension to the decision to have mixed-race children in the United States,” and then explores the historical truths and the current events that led to this train of thought. How will America view his son? What social world will he inherit?

The term Asian American, he reminds readers, is a recent one that supplanted “Oriental” or Asiatic. It came into being after the death of Vincent Chin in 1982, a man killed by unemployed auto workers in Detroit who attacked him because they assumed he was Japanese. The murderers were acquitted at a trial that brought people of Asian descent together in a united protest. 

“A word better than Oriental wouldn’t have made a difference in my father’s life,” Shih says, while later telling how “a burgeoning sense of myself as a person of color” helped to weaken the idea of hierarchy among America’s races. “People of color” outnumbered the white race and blurred the lines of the social construct that white men had created to protect and preserve their power.

The eight essays in Chinese Prodigal are excoriating, flaying the cruelties of U.S history toward immigrants of color as well as those that exist in the present and have been brought out from the shadows by politicians who condone and elevate racism. Shih’s mingling of the personal with the historical and the political at times becomes a tangle of confusion but his academic expertise wins out. He has things to teach and his country has a lot to learn.~Janet Brown