The Moon Represents My Heart by Pim Wangtechawat (Blackstone Publishing)

Imagine being born into a family of time travelers and having that gift become yours when you’re still a child. Tommy and Eva are lucky. Unlike their parents, they aren’t made aware of this talent alone, with parents who have no idea that this ability exists outside of storybooks. Joshua and Lily had learned to use their unusual travel skills in secret, until they met each other and slowly divulged their shared truth. When they discover their own children can whisk themselves back in time, they’re delighted and eager to make this a family affair.

Each of them have their own territories. Joshua returns to his childhood home in the Kowloon Walled City. Lily finds herself in England while Tommy is limited to London before 1950. Eva is pulled into the lives of her distant relatives, both dead and living. All of them would agree that time travel carries “a loss waiting to happen.” When that loss comes, their family dissolves forever, leaving Tommy and Eva to carry the weight of their gift alone and unguided.

A scientist and a mathematician, Joshua is reluctant to accept the limitations of time travel that constrain him and his family. Although they can explore the 20th Century from its very beginning, a boundary line separates them from other eras. When he and Lily have fleeting moments in 1899, he embarks upon The Experiment that will fully take them into the 19th Century.

Tommy and Eva wait for their parents on the day of The Experiment, reassuring themselves that an hour’s delay is nothing to fret over. When days have passed and they are still alone, they call Lily’s mother.

Their grandmother never acknowledges the probable death of her daughter and son-in-law, just as she has never welcomed the idea of time travel. To her the vanished parents are simply “gone” and the reason for this is one that she refuses to think about. She forbids her grandchildren to follow the example set by Lily and Joshua and when they do, it becomes a clandestine and shameful activity.

Eva uses her gifts to find a home with the relatives she meets on her secretive excursions into time. Tommy learns his talent carries a way to break hearts, especially his own. Steeped in darkness, he loses his ability to love.

Pim Wangtechawat chose her cumbersome title from the name of a song once made famous by a Hong Kong singer, Teresa Teng. This choice has little to do with her novel, other than a fleeting cameo appearance in the final chapter. Sadly, its amorphous quality is reflected in Wangtechawat’s writing. She frequently lapses into pages of sentences she’s broken into spacing that’s usually found only in poetry. However any poetic touches found here are based in cliches: “soft, golden light,” “a maze of twinkling lights,” “a cold, hardened look in her eyes.”

The Moon Represents My Heart is based on a promising idea that quickly becomes scattered and shapeless. It’s slated to become a series on Netflix, where visual details will supplant the hackneyed images and what seems vague may be sharpened into an intriguing mystery. For now, its story has dissolved as completely as the vanished parents, making it as irksome to read as it is to care about.~Janet Brown

Arcade Mania! The Turbo-Charged World of Japan's Game Centers by Brian Ashcroft (Kodansha)

I grew up in the late seventies and early eighties and one of my favorite pastimes was playing video games at an arcade. I remember the first time my friend and I saw our first video game, “Pong,” at a neighborhood pizza restaurant. Although it was a very simple game, we must have played it for over an hour. When I was a university student at the University of Washington, I worked part-time at a place called the College Inn Cafe and located diagonally from the cafe was a 24-hour video arcade called Arnold’s which I also frequented. However, with the advent of home systems, the video arcade soon became a thing of the past. 

Imagine my surprise when I spent the summer of 1980 in Japan and discovered there were video arcade cafes. These shops didn’t have arcade games where you stood and played. They were built into the tables themselves. You could order coffee or soda, have a sandwich and while seated, eating and drinking, you could play video games at the table. I thought that was so cool. Another fad was also just beginning in Japan at that time, something called karaoke. Who knew then that that would become a worldwide phenomena?

In 1995, I moved to Japan and wasn’t surprised to not find any video cafes, but taking their place were game centers. These were not one-story building video arcades like there were in the States but some of them could be two, three, or even four-story tall buildings filled with a whole range of games to play.

Brian Ashcroft did his own research and wrote the book Arcade Mania : The Turbo-Charged World of Japan’s Game Centers. Turbo-charged might be an understatement. Ashcroft’s detailed account of the rise and popularity of the Japanese game centers will make you want to experience the sensation yourself. Unlike the pachinko parlors with their noise and smoky atmospheres, the game centers in Japan are more family-friendly. 

The game centers in Japan are well-organized. if it’s a multi-story building, on the first floor you would usually find an assortment of crane games. In Japan, these crane games are called “UFO Catchers”, although the term was discontinued sometime in the mid-2000s. What draws people to these games are the different types of prizes they can get. Many of the prizes are limited editions of popular characters. Other prizes may include snack foods. A national crane game championship is held every year as well. 

In the nineties, another craze started at the game centers—sticker-picture machines. In 1995, a twenty-nine- year-old woman named Miho Sasaki, who was working for a Japanese arcade game developer called Atlus, saw that home-video editing machines could superimpose titles on pictures and print them out. This gave her an idea. She recalled “her own love of cute stickers when she was younger and how she’d put them all over her notebooks”. Her idea was to mix girls’ love of stickers and their love of taking pictures of themselves. By blending them together, she thought up the idea of the sticker-pictures, but her bosses initially rejected her idea.

At the time, fighting games were all the rage at game centers. Her bosses were salarymen in suits who thought the risk was too large and that a sticker picture machine in a game center would look out of place. However, three months later when Atlus had a new boss, Naoya Harano, he saw the potential of such a concept and thus the Print Club was born. Or as they say in Japan puri kura and by 1996, puri kura was all the rage, especially among high school girls. 

The crane games and sticker-picture machines are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Japan’s game centers. Ashcroft fills in the reader with the introduction of shooting games, rhythm games, fighting games, and games of chance. He further explores the game center world by talking about dedicated cabinets—“games that are housed in a specific casing and are built especially for the arcade experience”. 

It's been nearly thirty years since the introduction of the sticker-picture machines but they are still as popular as ever. Crane games continue to draw in children and adults alike. Now, there are game centers full of retro games that you can still play. These places appeal to adults who find them nostalgic and remind them of their childhood. For kids, there are now card-based games —“a mash-up of playing arcade games and collecting cards”. 

The video arcade may be a dinosaur of the past in the U.S. but the game centers in Japan are still thriving and will probably be here to stay for another twenty or thirty years. If you ever make it to Japan, aside from seeing temples and shrines, you should set foot in a game center to see what it’s all about. ~Ernie Hoyt

Japan : The Toothless Tiger by Declan Hayes (Tuttle)

Currently, with the weakness of the yen against the dollar and with North Korea continuing to test their missiles over Japanese terrain, Japan’s future is looking pretty bleak. Back at the beginning of the 21st century, author Declan Hayes had already made a number of predictions about Japan’s future. I decided to read his book Japan : The Toothless Tiger, which was originally published in 2001, to see if any of his predictions had come to fruition. 

Now that it is already 2024, you would think a lot of the material would be dated but what he said back in 2001 may still hold true today. “There is a specter haunting Japan and Asia: the specter of Chinese communism”. Hayes mentions two main points concerning his Chinese theory: “The overt, military one that her vast defense forces pose and the covert diplomatic one undermining America’s key alliance with Japan”. 

Hayes argues that it is in Japan’s best interest to rearm itself in order to defend its territories. While in theory, it may sound reasonable but it goes against the principles of Japan’s constitution. Throughout the book, Hayes says that Japan needs to build up its military. He argues under the assumption that the U.S. 7th Fleet, which is headquartered in Yokosuka, Japan, will eventually sail home to Hawaii. Without the protection of the U.S. Japan would easily fall into the hands of China. However, his assumption is not supported by any facts.

China has always been a threat to Asia and the world at large. Hayes says once the 7th Fleet leaves the vicinity, “China will eventually incorporate Taiwan and the islands of the South China Sea into her vast kingdom”. He further argues, “China’s resulting hegemony will put severe strain on the weakest link in America’s Asia defense strategy—Japan, the toothless tiger”. 

Hayes claims that because Japan has become a “toothless tiger”, North Korea often tests its missiles which enter Japanese territory and China’s navy often enters Japan’s waters without compunction. Because Japan is a toothless tiger, it can only “toothlessly grin and bear it and hope that things do not get worse”. 

Hayes' main focus seems to be the threat of China but he says it isn’t only China that Japan needs to be wary of. Japan must also build better relations with its neighbor South Korea. Japan’s history of military abuse in both China and South Korea cannot be forgotten or forgiven. Hayes also mentions that until the current government of Japan officially recognizes its crimes committed during the second world war, the relationship between the nations will continue to stand on thin ice. 

His suggestion is a very slippery slope. Although it was the Occupied Forces that wrote the Japanese constitution, it emphatically states that Japan renounces war and will not build up its military might so that it would repeat history. Japan is the only country in the world to be attacked by two atomic bombs and the country saw what devastation that could cause, not to mention the after-effects of the radiation fallout. 

It is now 2024 and the U.S. Fleet has not retired to Hawaii. Japan has also renewed its alliance with the U.S. that will continue to protect Japan and Asia and will also curb the threat that China poses. The U.S. government has also officially announced to China that if it tries to take Taiwan by force, the U.S. will protect Taiwan and will attack China in its defense.

The threat of a world-dominating China continues, as does the threat of North Korea. However, to insist that Japan rearm itself and build up its military goes against everything the Japanese government stands for. As long as relations between Japan and the U.S. continue, Japan will continue to be a toothless tiger but one that has power and an assertive ally on its side. ~Ernie Hoyt

Searching for Billie by Ian Gill (Blacksmith Books)

Louise Mary Newman, Marylou Newman,  Louise Gill, Billie Lee—with so many different personas for one woman, no wonder her son found it a challenge to learn who she really was. Since his mother handed Ian Gill in his infancy to a baby nurse in Shanghai, proclaiming “That was the end of my mothering days,” the eventual reunion between Billie and Ian was undoubtedly a bit difficult for both.

The enigmatic and dazzling figure whom Ian struggled to understand began life in true fairy tale fashion. A stranger left her at the front door of an Englishman and his Chinese wife, a couple living in Changsha. Pretty and smart, Louise Mary, called Mary Lou throughout her girlhood, was destined for great things. Her father told her that, right up until the moment he left his family for another that he had established

At sixteen, in a household that was now close to destitution, Mary Lou left her expensive school in Shanghai that her mother could no longer afford and began a career that would eventually take her to the greatness her father had predicted. In time the infant of unknown parentage would be given an MBE by Queen Elizabeth, becoming a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

Gill painstakingly recreates his mother’s eighty-nine years of life in almost agonizing detail. Beginning with her father’s parents emigration from England to Hong Kong and following the bureaucratic career of Billie’s adoptive father far more diligently than is necessary, at last he begins to unfold the meteoric rise of his mother’s colorful life. A woman who was friends with Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s closest adviser, along with the American adventuress Emily Hahn, and the Chinese author Lin Yutang, Billie’s brilliance caused her to rise from secretary to a position of international importance and kept her alive through imprisonment in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation of that city.

Gill’s family history flares into a fascinating narrative when he describes the circumstances that led to his birth. In the harsh conditions of Hong Kong’s Stanley Prison Camp, Billie, now the wife of a British soldier, went through a living hell when her young son died. As she began to recover, she was certain her mental health depended on having another child.

An affair with a handsome journalist brought about a pregnancy. Billie, despite severe malnutrition, carried her baby to full term, throughout her time at Stanley, onto a ship that would carry her to New Zealand after the Japanese surrender, and into a Wellington hospital. There she gave birth to the baby she had longed for, an event she never would have survived if she had still been within the confines of the prison camp.

Billie’s astounding luck pervaded her entire life and coupled with her brains, brought her to an impressive career at the United Nations. However intimate relationships weren’t her specialty. Although she had several long and devoted love affairs, none of them were permanent. And although her son is a byproduct of her stunning ambition and determination, their bond only becomes close after Ian grows to adulthood.

Searching for Billie is a book that demands persistence. It sinks under unnecessary details and lingers far too long upon family members who are extraneous. However through the slog, Billie shines like a submerged diamond, irresistible and worth all the effort it takes to rediscover her life.~Janet Brown

Under the Naga Tail by Mae Bunseng Taing, with James Taing (Greenleaf Book Group Press)

Mae is eleven when Apollo 11 puts men on the moon, a feat that captures his imagination and makes him believe he’s living in a new era when anything is possible—even for a boy living in rural Cambodia. But as he nears the end of his adolescence, another era closes in upon him, his family,  and his country, one that begins with Year Zero.

Cambodia has been in turmoil for several years, with “freedom fighters” battling the puppet government of the U.S.-backed Lon Nol. Popular opinion sides with the insurgents because they purportedly will restore King Sihanouk to his throne. Mae’s father is a firm believer in this theory, even when a woman emerges from the jungle, fleeing in terror for the nearby Thai border. 

“Monsters…barbaric monsters…that’s what they are,” she tells Mae’s family as she recounts the atrocities committed by the rebel forces, “You must leave.” But Mae’s father is positive that “the freedom fighters were defending the honor of the king.” He had already fled one country, leaving China to find peace and prosperity in Cambodia, and he is certain it’s unnecessary to do this again. He and his eight children are staying put, even though it’s a short journey from their home to Thailand.

Within the first twenty pages of Under the Naga Tail, his decision becomes engulfed in horror that turns impossibly and dreadfully more intense with every passing chapter. Although the rebel forces prevail and are greeted with cheers and hope, they immediately close the border and kill three “Thai thieves” in a public execution that the entire community is forced to watch. Then they evacuate the area, claiming it’s a temporary measure to avoid American bombs. Mae and his family would never live in their former home again and many more wouldn’t survive to reclaim what once belonged to them.

The savagery that engulfs Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 is unmitigated by liberating troops from Vietnam who have no room for compassion. Across the border, where Mae and his family seek the safety of Thailand after barely surviving four years of starvation and forced labor, there’s no sanctuary waiting for them. According to C.I.A. reports, forty-two thousand Cambodians, Mae and his family among them, were removed from refugee camps by Thai troops and were taken to the sacred mountain of Preah Vihear. From there they were forced to climb down the other side of the mountain, back into Cambodia. Ten thousand of them were never seen again.

Scant mercy is given to the Cambodians who are displaced and subjected in the years between 1975 and 1979—not offered by the liberators nor by the country that could shelter them. The atrocities of the Pol Pot Time and the cruelties of its aftermath are revealed in excruciating detail, disclosed as Mae and his family live them. His account is appalling and soul-wrenching and guaranteed to disturb your dreams.

The miracle of his survival, with almost all of his family, only occurred because of strength and courage that goes beyond all human limits. If this book is painfully difficult to read, only imagine the agony that came as a son wrote the words his father used as he recalled and resurrected a hell on earth for the world to see and remember. Under the Naga Tail shows the bare bones of history that are all too often veiled in statistics and sanitized by bureaucratic reports. It turns readers into witnesses who just might help to change present-day crimes against humanity.~Janet Brown

Where Strange Gods Call: Harry Hervey's 1920s Hong Kong, Macau and Canton Sojourns (Blacksmith Books)

Before Fu Manchu, the Dragon Lady, the Yellow Peril, and the benign cliche of Charlie Chan, there was Harry Hervey. A young prodigy who published his first piece of pulp fiction when he was sixteen and whose stories were frequently found in Black Mask magazine after his early debut, Hervey published his first novel at the age of 22. Caravans by Night: A Romance of India was followed a year later by The Black Parrot: A Tale of the Golden Chersonese. This apparently gave Hervey a financial windfall that took him to the part of the world that he had profitably imagined.

In 1923, Hervey voyages to Hong Kong where he immediately begins his search for corners of that city that would be “rich in the atmosphere of Cathay.” Fortunately for him, he has a local contact, a wealthy, cultured Hong Kong resident whom he had met in New York. Chang Yuan becomes Hervey’s guide and mentor, giving him an introduction to “a race that had always seemed inscrutable to me.” Together the two explore the “nauseous effluvia” and “fetid gloom” of Chinese opera theaters, the “gorgeous wickedness” of Macau’s gambling halls, and meet the “queer, impassive little dolls” who sing in restaurants while wealthy gentlemen have their suppers. “It was inevitable,” Hervey says, “that we should visit an opium house,” a place he finds “as colorless as naked lust.”

In between these forays into the parts of Hong Kong that Hervey finds “very wicked and very pleasant,” Chang Yuan delivers interminable lectures on Chinese history and politics. These are so meticulously recorded that it becomes impossible to believe they’re not the puerile thoughts of Hervey himself. This theory is almost confirmed when Hervey describes Chang as “uncommunicative,” which would preclude his monologues that take up many of the pages in his Hong Kong chapters.

Without Chang Yuan’s companionship, Hervey seems daunted by Canton, which he describes as “too stupendous and too indefinite to be sheathed in words.” He certainly doesn’t explore it with the enthralled energy shown by Constance Gordon-Cumming, forty-four years earlier. However he has a focus for this visit. Fascinated by Sun Yat Sen from childhood, he manages to gain an audience with his hero, whom he terms the Doctor of Canton, a man whose “personality submerged words.” The words recorded by Hervey speak of the threats posed by Europe and Japan and of the “militarists of the North (who) wish to Prussianize China.” The interview ends with Sun Yat Sen declaring the necessities of having only one currency and one language shared by all Chinese, which Hervey later dismisses as “splendid dreams.”

This reprint of two chapters from Hervey’s Where Strange Gods Call: Pages Out of the East seems a peculiar choice for Blacksmith Book’s new series, China Revisited. Hervey’s writing can barely qualify as travel writing, steeped as it is in his fictional fantasies and tarnished by his thinly veiled racism. “How pleasant I was (sic) to see soldiers who were not yellow,” he gushes when passing a group of British troopers and Chang Yuan is described as “astonishingly well educated…faintly grandiose.” Not even his childhood idol escapes the snobbery of this Texan who only made it through high school. In a magnanimous description he says Sun Yat Sen’s perfect enunciation “was not surprising, as he is a college graduate.” It escapes Hervey that even the sing-song girl who entertained him with a song in Pidgin English is bilingual, while he himself, in true American fashion, probably is not.

Perhaps when all of the choices for this series of attractive little books are published, Harry Hervey, who later became a Hollywood screenwriter largely because of his presumed knowledge of Asia, will take his place among them without making readers wondering why. Let’s hope so.~Janet Brown

Wanderings in China: Hong Kong and Canton, Christmas and New Year 1878-1879 by Constance Gordon-Cumming (Blacksmith Books)

Constance Gordon-Cumming was in her fifties when she first came to Hong Kong on Christmas Day in 1878 but her reactions to this city, and later to Canton, had the enthusiasm of a young girl who had just left home for the first time.

This was far from the case. Gordon-Cumming had been a devoted traveler for twenty years, making her first overseas voyage when, in her thirties, she sailed to visit her sister in India. From there she had gone to Ceylon, Fiji, New Zealand, and Japan before she set her sights upon China. Although at this point she had seen enough of the world to view it with a jaded vision, this wasn’t her style. An artist who had the goal of ending “never a day without at least one careful-colored sketch,” she looked at the world with hungry eyes that took note of everything she saw.

Gordon-Cumming falls in love with Hong Kong’s “steep streets of stairs” that lead past “luxurious houses encircled by “camellias and roses and scarlet poinsettias.” Bamboo groves and banyan trees, the intertwining of the city’s Chinese and Portuguese areas, the piercing blue water of the surrounding harbor—”Only think what a paradise for an artist!”

Paradise goes up in flames that night when Christmas festivities are interrupted by an act of arson that threatens to consume the city. Perched above the conflagration in a Mid-Level home, Gordon-Cumming watches the fire as it destroys Chinatown and advances upon the affluent homes of Hong Kong’s expatriates. Ten acres of the city are devastated with 400 houses gone in a single night, an unimaginable spectacle with “a horrible sort of attraction…so awful and yet so wonderfully beautiful.”

By New Year’s Day, Hong Kong’s “social treadmill” has resumed and by January 9th a short voyage takes Gordon-Cumming to Canton. There she’s met by a “resplendent palanquin” that’s fit for a mandarin but waits to take her to her hostess on the Western enclave of Shamian Island. Delighted by the English social life that hold sway in this community, she refuses to succumb to its charms that keeps many foreign residents of Shamian from going into the heart of Canton.

Instead Gordon-Cumming submerges herself in the city’s shops and markets, on streets with names that are “touchingly allegorical”—The Street of Refreshing Breezes, The Street of One Thousand Grandsons. She’s overwhelmed by the commerce that she finds there—flowering branches for Chinese New Year, oranges that have been peeled because the peels, used for medicine, are more valuable than the fruit, ivory carvers, tallow-chandlers, vendors that sell drinking water next to porters that transport raw sewage. (Tea drinking is the pervasive custom because the water for it has been boiled, she observes.)

From there she is taken to Canton’s riverine world where a separate city exists. Families live in domestic comfort on boats, with order preserved by “water police” who are notoriously corrupt. Vessels that hold barbershops and medical clinics serve this community, along with market boats and river-borne kitchens. Floating biers carry corpses to their final destination while other crafts hold leper colonies. Gordon-Cumming, with aplomb befitting the daughter of a British baronet, finds her way to the “flower boats” that she euphemistically describes as places where dinner parties are attended by wealthy citizens who are entertained by “singing-women.”

From Canton she travels to Macau, a place she finds “most fascinating” but so “essentially un-Chinese that I have decided to omit the letters referring to it.” This decision does quite a bit to illuminate Gordon-Cumming’s character and helps to explain the decision that ends her life of travel. A year after her time in Canton, she remains aboard a ship that evacuates its passengers when it runs aground. Refusing to leave the watercolors she has painted on the voyage, she stays with the captain until the two of them are finally brought to safety.

Did her explorations come to an end because she was unnerved by this disaster or was she blacklisted by shipping companies because she refused to take to the lifeboats when that command was given? Somehow I doubt that this conclusion to her travels was Gordon-Cumming’s idea and I’m sure she fumed over it for the rest of her life.~Janet Brown

Doraemon : Gadget Cat from the Future (Selection 6) by Fujiko F. Fujio (Shogakukan)

If you love Japanese anime or have lived in Japan, then you would be familiar with the blue robot cat named Doraemon and you would know the robot cat’s most famous gadget is its dokodemo door or “4-D (fourth dimension) pocket”. The manga was first serialized in 1969. The chapters were then collected in forty-five tankobon volumes, tankobon being a Japanese word now used in English to refer to cartoons collected in one volume from the weekly and monthly manga magazines. 

The manga was adapted into an anime three times. The first time in 1973, then again in 1979, and finally in 2005. There are over forty anime films as well, including two computer generated full-length features. The merchandise spawned from the manga and anime series is still a multi-billion industry that continues to appeal to children and adults alike. 

I did not realize at first that Doraemon : Gadget Cat from the Future was part of a series published by Shogakukan English Comics. I would have started with the first volume but as these stories are not collected in chronological order, it doesn’t matter which volume to start with. Also available in English are ten volumes of the story originally published by Tento Mushi books, which includes the Japanese text outside the picture frames. The Tento Mushi series follows the same order as the Japanese manga. 

There’s a bit of history concerning Doraemon. As mentioned, Doraemon is a robot gadget cat from the future and was born on September 3, 2112. Hardcore Doraemon fans will know that the blue robot cat was originally yellow and also had ears, even though the backstory was written long after the manga debuted. 

In the storyline, as Doraemon was napping, a mouse nibbled off his ears. When Doraemon saw himself in the mirror, he turned blue from the shock. As to why Doraemon travels back in time from the future? It was to help Nobita, a ten-year-old Japanese schoolboy who at heart is good but is very lazy. He gets bad grades at school and is terrible at sports. His future grandchild, Sewashi Nobi, sends the cat to take care of Nobita so future generations will have a better life. 

Surrounding Nobita are his classmates Shizuka, the main female character who’s also the love interest of Nobita and Gian, a big bully who often steals toys or other items from Nobita and his friends. He often gets his own comeuppance for his actions though. Then there is Suneo, a spoiled rich boy who likes to show off how rich he and his family are. 

In this collection of Doraemon stories, Nobita is once again bullied by Gian who steals his ice cream cone, gives it a lick, then says Nobita can have it back. But as it was licked by Gian, Nobita doesn’t want it. He cries to Doraemon to do something about it. 

In another episode, Suneo brags that his family is going to ride on a steam locomotive. When Nobita finds a ticket for the Milky Way Express that Doraemon drops, Nobita invites his friends who at first don’t believe him, but they all get into a little trouble when they discover there is no way to get back home.

There are a total of fifteen stories in this collection and its main aim is to help Japanese learners of English by providing them with a one-point English lesson. Doraemon remains as popular today as it was after its debut and there is even a Fuji F. Fujio museum in Kawasaki where you can see Doraemon’s development along with other works by the manga artist. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Dragon's Pearl by Sirin Phathanothai (Simon & Schuster)

In 1956, as the Cold War took on lethal proportions, Thai politician Sang Phathanothai sent two of his children to China. This was a clandestine and potentially dangerous move for everyone concerned, one that was inspired by the ancient custom of tribute paid by one nation to a greater power. Phathanothai saw the Korean War as a Chinese victory against the United States and although Thailand had fought as a U.S. ally in that war, he felt it was essential to establish ties with the People’s Republic. In the sort of byzantine politics that Thailand specializes in, he convinced Thailand’s prime minister that by giving his children to China under extreme secrecy, an act that would go against U.S. interests if it were ever disclosed, he would create an indissoluble bridge between the two countries.

When they leave for China, Warnwai is a twelve-year-old boy and his sister Sirin is only eight. Wai is old enough to carry the responsibility that he takes on when he is designated as a representative of Thailand’s Prime Minister. This task gives him a connection to his homeland and fosters his ability to keep careful records of his meetings with Chinese officials. Sirin, an indulged and pretty little girl, has no such weight placed upon her. For her this is a bizarre vacation in a country where she has no maids to wait upon her and where the house they live in compares sadly with their Thai home that had twenty rooms on three floors and four gardeners to tend a profusion of orchids.

The two children are placed under the guardianship of Zhou Enlai, China’s premier who’s second only to Mao Zedong, a decision that Wai understands and records as fully as he’s able in careful notes and a daily journal. Sirin quickly succumbs to Zhou’s legendary charm and swiftly begins to think of him and his wife as her new parents. Equally delightful and much more accessible is Liao Chengzhi, a high-ranking official whose father was American-born and who has an informality that brightens Sirin’s new life.

Although she lacks the diplomatic skills that her brother had been schooled in, Sirin has learned early in life that to gain the attention she wanted, she needs to be attentive as well as beguiling. By the time she goes to China, she’s absorbed a rudimentary political understanding that she brings to bear in her conversations with Zhou and Liao. But while Wai absorbs these conversations as an observer, Sirin takes them to heart. The advice she receives from her Chinese “fathers” lets her adjust to the sacrifices of The Great Leap Forward and the precursor to the Cultural Revolution that flourishes briefly in 1957. When she learns that her father has been arrested in Thailand, she clings even more tightly to the relationships she’s forged with the men who are now her protectors.

Their Chinese lives aren’t easy to step away from because of the secretive nature that has pervaded them from the beginning. in 1967 Mao’s wife Jiang Ching begins to strengthen her power by nurturing the seeds of the Cultural Revolution. Her Red Guards ransack Liao’s home and issue thinly veiled threats against Zhao. It’s the wrong time for Sang Phathanothai to come to China at last, bearing a conciliatory message from the US government. His children know the danger this action carries. Their father does not. When he makes the message public and then departs, he leaves Wai and Surin unprotected, their contact with Zhou Enlai cut off.

Wai defends his father and is expelled from China. Surin, alone and defenseless, says “Wai’s world was not disintegrating. Mine was.” Officials tell her “You have to choose your own destiny. Denounce your brother.”

To survive in a country that is going mad, Surin publicly denounces her entire family on a radio broadcast, an action that does little to soften her life in the years to come. Her life is caught in the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, where her brains and charm just barely keep her safe.

Her story is a devastating account of a time that China has done its best to erase from its history, an era that has inescapably shaped Surin’s life. Despite an escape that is close to miraculous, she has never been able to leave China completely, a country that is more her home than the one she was born in. The Dragon’s Pearl, told with the acumen and objectivity that kept her alive in a perilous time, is a balanced look at a country few understand and many fear.~Janet Brown

Here After by Amy Lin (Zibby Books)

When her husband goes off on a morning run, Amy Lin tells him, “Don’t go too hard. Love you.” Those are the last words she will ever say to him. An hour or so later, Kurtis Nakayama’s body is found on a trail, dead before he hit the ground. A prolonged autopsy finds no reason for his death.

Kurtis is 32. Amy is 31. They’ve been married for less than two years. They’ve been in love for seven. With his death, Amy “falls out of time.” Ten days afterward, she’s diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis with clots in one leg, her abdomen, and a lung. If she dies, she wonders, will Kurtis be waiting for her? She lives to cremate her husband and begins to wrestle with the longing to die herself.

When they first met, Amy told Kurtis she was a substitute teacher. He contradicted her after he found a blog she had kept in the past. “Why did you say that? You’re a writer.”

Writing emerges again as she enters a life without Kurtis. With scalding honesty she narrates the account of what it is to be a widow when the man with whom she planned a future is dead. Grief, she discovers, is an unexplored emotion in modern Western culture. Nobody wants to hear about it and even therapists are poorly equipped to deal with it. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, has an entry for “excessive grief disorder,” when mourning the death of someone close goes on beyond twelve months.

Amy is told otherwise by a counselor. Grief sharpens after the first year and then sometimes again around the third through fifth years. “Grief is a long journey, “ the counselor says and Amy thinks “I can’t do this for five years.”

“How are you doing, friends ask, “I can’t imagine what you’re going through. Take it a day at a time. Hey, doing well?” As time goes on, they tell Amy “It’s difficult to hear. It’s too heavy. It makes me too sad. I need a break.” One psychotherapist persistently refers to Kurtis’s death as “a stressful event.” Another asks “Do you feel as if you’ve been hit by a train?” “No,” Amy says, “You hear a train coming.”

For the first time in their lives together, Amy asks her father how long it was before he finally felt “space from his grief” when in his early twenties, he faced the death of his father. “Years,” he says, and then after a moment, “maybe never.” 

The widely accepted template of Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief is one Amy doesn’t fit within. She discovers that it was never intended for mourning. It was developed after studying the behavior of terminally ill patients as they faced their own deaths. There is no template for young widows, only statistics. They face the “widowhood effect,” with a heightened risk of suicide in the year after their husbands have died. They are 22% more likely than married women to die “of other causes…that may seem random but are, in fact, not.”

Amy heard the screams of Kurtis’s parents when she told them he was dead. She stays alive because she knows her death would cause her parents that same agony. When she’s given a residency at Yaddo, she goes because long before she promised Kurtis she would take him; she would show him “every single thing.” She transforms her anguish into art and leaves us all with an unyielding question.

“How can grief be so universal and yet still be so widely misunderstood?”~Janet Brown