From a Chinese City by Gontran de Poncins (Trackless Sands Press)

Vietnam was enjoying a brief respite of peace when Gontran do Poncins came to visit. The French had been vanquished in 1954 and the Americans hadn’t yet begun to buttress their domino theory with armed troops. In February of 1955 de Poncins arrived, a travel writer who had achieved acclaim for Kabloona, his account of living with the Canadian Eskimo for fifteen months. During his northern stay, de Poncins practiced total immersion, living, eating, and behaving as did his hosts, to the point that he completed a 1400-mile trip across the Arctic behind a dog sled. 

When he decides to spend four months in Vietnam, he chooses to stay in the Chinese city of Cholon, no doubt expecting to be able to replicate the success of his time with the Eskimos. Unfortunately he fails.

Cholon at the time of de Poncins’ arrival was a city of 650,000. Although its neighbor, Saigon, had been heavily influenced by its French colonizers, Cholon remained Chinese. As de Poncins was told at the onset of his stay, “Cholon ignores the West and has no desire to mingle with it.”

“Cholon is the Chinese pleasure city,” de Poncins says, filled with nightclubs, opium dens, restaurants, and gambling hells, but he soon discovers that’s for “the white man hankering for orientalism.” The Cholon he lives in is devoid of luxury. His world is defined by his hotel; its rooms are barebones-basic with open doors and an entire town flourishes in its lobby. As was true in his life with the Eskimos, de Poncins is immersed in a life without privacy; his door is expected to be open and anyone is free to peek inside at will. On the other hand, he’s free to observe those around him as ravenously as others do him

The staff of the hotel are puzzled. No matter what comforts are offered to him--boy, girl, opium--de Poncins refuses them. His interest is taken up by the streets outside and the life that courses through them. Every day he sits, watches, sketches, and writes about what he sees and gradually the pace and routine of the city becomes vivid. 

It isn’t always pretty. Although de Poncins is quite lyrical about the special sounds that announce the coming of street vendors and tradesmen, the beauty of the food displays, the grace of the river sampans, the ‘enchantment of form,” his drawings of the people around him are crude caricatures. When he shows them to people in his hotel who have asked to see, they turn away without comment. 

As much as he’s an indefatigable chronicler of everything that meets his eye, de Poncins is a master of generalization--”the Chinese,” he says and then launches into an idiosyncrasy that he believes he understands. As he watches laborers in the streets, he wonders if they perhaps aren’t of “a different species” from his own.

He tries valiantly to go deeper. A man who can speak several languages other than French, he attempts to learn Chinese without success. His wish to meet a Chinese woman of culture and breeding is laughed down by his friends as being impossible but this doesn’t keep him from expounding upon the virtues of Chinese women and the “wisdom” of the Chinese institution of marriage.

But de Poncins, in spite of the briefness of his time there, gives a cinematographer’s view of Cholon’s streets. His gift of observation is enviable--if only he’d carried a camera instead of a pen and paper. Even so, readers who wade past his condescension and superficial conclusions are shown a portion of a city that has no doubt vanished with only a few traces left behind.~Janet Brown

Out by Natsuo Kirino (Kodansha)

Out is a gruesome murder mystery centering on the relationship of four women who work the graveyard-shift in a boxed-lunch factory. The book was first published in 1997 and won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award for Best Novel that year. It is Natsuo Kirino’s first novel to be translated into English and was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel in 2004. 

The four women are Yayoi Yamamoto, Yoshie Azuma, Kuniko Jonouchi, and Masako Katori. Yayoi is the youngest of the four and is married and has two children. Yoshie, who the other three call the Skipper, is a widower in her late fifties, who also cares for her bedridden mother-in-law. Kuniko is an overweight woman who enjoys living beyond her means and is trying to keep one step ahead of a loan shark. Masako is a married woman who is estranged from her husband and teenage son. 

Yayoi’s husband is a good-for-nothing gambler, womanizer, and wife-beater. He has dwindled the family account to nearly zero. He is also stalking a hostess named Anna who works as a hostess at a club called Mika in Shinjuku’s Kabukicho District. Anna is the girlfriend of the club owner who also runs an illegal gambling casino called Kunimatsu in the same building.

The club owner’s name is Satake. Satake has a dark history of his own. He once killed a woman in a most violent fashion and spent seven years in prison for the crime. Satake is convinced he needs to keep a low profile in his businesses due to his prison record. Currently, Satake must deal with a problem customer at both of his establishments who happens to be Yayoi’s husband. 

Yayoi is looking at her bruised body caused by her husband’s violence and she’s overcome by a very powerful emotion - hatred. The following evening Yayoi has another argument with her husband. When he says, “Can’t you be nice once in a while?”, it enrages her and she strangles her husband to death with her belt. Yayoi sits and looks at her dead husband and says out loud, “Couldn't you have been nice once in a while?”

What is Yayoi to do? She confides in Masako who recruits the Skipper and Kuniko to help dispose of the husband’s body by cutting it up and throwing the bagged body parts away in different areas of the city. Unfortunately, the police have found some of the bags and now they are investigating the murder. 

Their number one suspect is Satake, as the police have found Yayoi’s husband’s coat at the casino and have witnesses who saw Satake and Yayoi’s husband fighting.  Satake is arrested and confined for nearly a month but is released due to a lack of evidence. During his incarceration, he loses both businesses and now he’s out for revenge. 

Kirino draws the reader into the seedier side of Japan. The story is set in a modern Japan that few foreigners see. A city full of host clubs, Yakuza, and loan sharks.The story will appeal to fans of suspense-thrillers and true crime.  I couldn’t put the book down. Will the women get away with murder? Will Satake find them and take his revenge? Or, will the police solve the crime before there is another death? ~Ernie Hoyt

China Syndrome by Karl Taro Greenfield (Harper Perennial)

A rapid soar in vinegar sales was the first warning. In Southern China, because boiling vinegar is an air purification method that’s used to combat respiratory illness. Soon the Heyuan Daily reported that antibiotics and herbal medicines were also being purchased in unprecedented amounts, but the paper assured its readers there was no fear of an epidemic. Then all news of any illness disappeared.

But when a Hong Kong  hospital head prepared to attend a conference in the southern city of Guangzhou, a Chinese physician said, “Don’t come. Something bad is going on here.” A month earlier, at an influenza conference in Beijing attended by World Health Organization officials, clinicians from the province of Guangdong in southern China had reported an influenza outbreak that had “people dying like flies.” 

These bits of information were all that surfaced and only virologists paid attention. When birds were found dead in a Hong Kong wetlands refuge, virologists from the University of Hong Kong grew alarmed. In 1997, the avian flu, H5N1, had jumped species from birds to humans. It had been contained but its threat was still a vivid memory.  Bird feces were tested for this virus. It wasn’t there.

In the border city of Shenzhen, a worker in a “Wild Flavor” restaurant, where wild animals were killed to order and cooked on the spot, had come down with a severe respiratory illness that swiftly spread to hospital staff. However, China has “thousands of unexplained respiratory cases a year” and Guangdong, where the bulk of these cases appeared, is the same size as Germany. A couple of hundred cases across the province excited little attention. It wasn’t until an infected doctor unwittingly spread the illness on a trip to Hong Kong that attention became focused upon it. Tourists who had stayed in his hotel carried it across the Pacific when they flew back to the United States. 

Now there was a potential global epidemic brewing, “a biological Armageddon.” The virus was soon in six different countries.  It was isolated and identified as a coronavirus, never before found in humans, and was given a name, SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Karl Taro Greenfield was the editor of Time Asia, based in Hong Kong when SARS struck. In China Syndrome he gives a horrifying account of how an epidemic spreads, from descriptions of victims who didn’t have enough energy to blink or twitch their facial muscles, whose countenances were completely blank, to Beijing’s suppression of information as its citizens died, in order to safeguard the economic boost that comes with the Spring Festival. Greenfield explains the popularity of  “Wild Flavor” restaurants whose dishes of exotic animals from around the world are believed to confer good luck and prosperity--as well as enhanced social status-- upon the diner, and tells how the wild animal markets were closed after they were proved to be a source of the coronavirus, only to reopen months later. And he poses the question: Why do viruses that are programmed to kill jump species and focus their efforts upon humans? 

China Syndrome should have been a wake-up call. Covid-19 is, according to WHO, “genetically related to the coronavirus responsible for the SARS outbreak of 2003. While related, the two viruses are different.” But, as humanity did with the Influenza of 2018, SARS was dismissed from public attention as soon as it disappeared. China Syndrome should be required reading around the world, especially for global leaders.~Janet Brown

Getting Genki in Japan : The Adventures and Misadventures of an American Family in Tokyo by Karen Pond (Tuttle)

Karen Pond and her family, which includes a husband and three sons, pack their belongings for an impending move because the father has accepted a new position in his company. However, the family is not moving across town or to another state. No, they are moving to one of the world’s largest cities located in a foreign country. They are moving to Tokyo, Japan. A city as different as night and day compared to their coastal hometown in Maine

Pond may sound a bit flustered and out of her element in her delightful book Getting Genki in Japan, a collection of articles which were previously published in INTOUCH, a monthly magazine of the Tokyo American Club, and also published in Tokyo Families Magazine. The stories are full of humor and include beautiful illustrations by Akiko Saito.

Pond is baffled by the high-tech washlets she finds in the bathroom of a department store. She learns to leave her inhibitions at the door when she has her first hot spring experience. She waltzes out of a bathroom still wearing the toilet slippers. She uses gestures at a pharmacy to get medicine for a stomach ache for her husband and feels triumphant when the pharmacist says, “Wakarimashita” (I understand). However, she didn’t bring her husband home antacid medicine. She bought her husband a pregnancy test!

At a company dinner, Pond mistakes edamame (green soybeans) for a peapod and eats the whole pod instead of squeezing out the beans. One of her husband’s colleagues says to her, “We are curious about something. In Japan, we squeeze the edamame bean into the mouth like this. We would never eat the whole bean. It is very fascinating that in your culture you eat the whole bean.” In order to spare herself from embarrassment, she responds by saying, “This is exactly how I eat edamame in my area of the States. It’s tradition, really. It is good for the character. Mmmmmmm….” 

Of course the biggest difficulty she must overcome is the language barrier. Some of her language follies include introducing her husband as her shuujin which translates to “prisoner”, the proper word being shujin. Or telling a Japanese mother that her child is kowai (scary) instead of kawaii (cute). She doesn’t realize that irashaimasse means “welcome” and not “please take off your shoes''. The language barrier rears its ugly head again when Pond orders cocoa using the English pronunciation of “koko” which means “here” instead of “ko-ko-aah” as it’s pronounced in Japanese.

As an expat living in Japan myself, I can relate to many of the situations Pond finds herself in. I once ate soramame (broad bean), skin and all before my friend told me I am supposed to squeeze out the bean inside. Many of her stories made me laugh out loud.  Some of her anecdotes may be exaggerated for maximum humorous effect and at times her lack of common sense borders on the unbelievable. However, the book is light-hearted and easy to read and is an entertaining romp that will appeal to foreign residents and first-time visitors to Japan alike. ようこうそ日本へ！Welcome to Japan! ~Ernie Hoyt

A Nail the Evening Hangs on by Monica Sok (Copper Canyon Press)

“Who is this history written for,” Monica Sok asks when she reads about Cambodia. “Is it written for me?”  In her book of poems, A Nail the Evening Hangs On, Sok writes for and about her family, people who survived a time “when family was being destroyed.”

Sok chronicles the words of survivors without ever mentioning the names of the force that tore Cambodia apart. She tells of an afternoon in 1998  when she and her brother were sent outside to play as her parents sit in front of the television, watching “an old man die in his bed.” Only the title reveals that the dying man was Pol Pot.

Words her parents have told her are fired like bullets in her poetry. Sisters search for water but instead “find, full of air, a balloon...swollen in the river.” A man who survives through lies stays awake in the dark: “I thought I heard escape.” A woman watches her husband, “the last historian,” scratch words with a stick onto tree bark; “he burns a dangerous light.”

After the war, Khmer fishermen poison egrets to sell at Thai border markets, “knowing the pendulum of war could swing anytime...They were sure it wasn’t over.” The egrets let them  have food to ration, to save in case they needed to leave again.

In Pennsylvania, Sok’s grandmother weaves silk on her loom, “her hair falls, not as the rain does but as nails the evening hangs on.” Her silk received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s shown on the cover of Sok’s book, saffron and deep turquoise, its texture palpable in the photograph, holding memories and promises, loss and sorrow, transformed into beauty.

Sok has spoken in an interview of “Cambodian experience contextualized to fit into an American gaze.” On her visits to Cambodia, her own gaze is divided by her family’s history and her American upbringing. Eating foie gras prepared by a French chef in Siem Reap, she’s watched by a local family having a meal in their shop, wondering if she, “sitting so fancy on a restaurant patio alone,” is Khmer. “In America I don’t get to do this rich people thing.” In Cambodia, Sok is unable to stomach it, vomiting it up  as she rushes to the toilet. In a Phnom Penh hotel with other university students from the U.S., she says, “The Americans hate me and I hate them, but they’re the only students with me, and maybe I’m American too.” It’s the time of the Water Festival and as people crowd onto a bridge to give their offerings to the river, there’s “a human stampede...347 reported dead, 755 injured.” On the following evening the American students go dancing at The Heart of Darkness, “they still don’t understand but I go with them anyway.”

Trauma, Sok reminds us, is passed down through DNA, “molecular scars in the genes.” But the “revolutionaries who wanted so-called Year Zero so bad” have been turned into mosquitoes, she’s told in Cambodia. “Don’t bend. Slap.”

“We can make our own  worlds as easily as we can laugh,” Sok has said in an interview. Her poetry reveals new worlds while remembering the old one, as her grandmother did when she turned her memories into radiant silk.~Janet Brown

Available from ThingsAsian Books

Slumdog Millionaire by Vikas Swarup (Penguin)

“I have been arrested. For winning a quiz show.” says Ram Mohammad Thomas, the hero of Vikas Swarup’s novel Slumdog Millionaire. This book was originally published as “Q&A” but was given a new title after the success of the movie adaptation. Ram Mohammad Thomas has successfully answered twelve questions correctly on India’s popular quiz show, “Who Will Win a Billion?” but the producers of the show think the only way he could have won is by cheating. 

Ram lives in Dharavi, one of the largest slums in the poorest area of Mumbai. The authorities come for him in the middle of the night. Arrests here are “as common as pickpockets on the local train.” This is an area where people are often carted off without any explanation. As Ram is led away, he hears a voice in the neighborhood say, “There goes another one”. 

Neil Johnson and Billy Nanda, two people involved with the quiz program come to the police station to talk to Ram. Johnson asks the show’s producer, Nanda if Ram even understands English to which he replies “How can you expect him to speak English? He’s just a dumb waiter in some godforsaken restaurant, for Chrissake!”

Johnson pleads with the police commissioner to help prove that Ram cheated on the quiz show. They do not take any notice of Ram who is still in the room because he is just a waiter and “waiters don’t understand English”. The commissioner asks what’s in it for him and Ram hears two words - “ten percent”. 

Ram is then taken away and is beaten and tortured for hours on end. Ram knows he will sign a confession statement if the beatings continue, however, before Ram can sign any statement, he is saved from the police by a woman who claims to be his lawyer and is immediately released from police custody.

The lawyer says she wants to help Ram prove he did not cheat on the show. She tells him she has a copy of the entire quiz show broadcast and says “If you didn’t cheat, I must know how you knew”. Ram tells her what he told the police, that he just knew the answers. He then begins to tell his story of how each question on the quiz show was related to an episode in his life. 

The life of Ram Mohammed Thomas reads like a Shakespearean tragedy blended with the comedy of the absurd. Fortune and misfortune rules his life. An orphan who has to use his brain and wits to survive and succeed in a very seedy world.

The story is humorous at times and can also be read as an indictment against India’s class system that still seems to be prevalent today. You cannot help but root for Ram in his case against the injustices of a highly corrupt system. You will laugh and you will cry and you may wish your life was just as lucky as Ram’s without having to deal with the misfortunes.. ~Ernie Hoyt

The End of October by Lawrence Wright (Knopf)

Reading The End of October as a novel brings on a strong case of deja vu. A leading epidemiologist travels to a refugee camp in Indonesia where he finds a hemorrhagic virus with a horrifying fatality rate has taken hold. Unfortunately the man who had driven him to this death site immediately goes on hajj to Mecca where three million potential victims are gathered. As cases begin to spread among the faithful, the holy city is cordoned off and the world begins to characterize this as a Muslim disease. 

As the general public learns of this new virus, the novel corresponds to what we’ve experienced in 2020. People rush to stores, frantically buying and hoarding groceries, pharmaceuticals, face masks, and guns. Schools are closed, hospitals accept only emergency cases, the National Guard is called into play. Shelter in place goes into effect. Separated from his U.S. family, the epidemiologist fights to return to them while desperately searching for the source of the virus and hoping to discover a vaccine. 

But this isn’t just another end-of-the-world potboiler. Lawrence Wright is a journalist who won the Pulitzer for his book on 9/11, The Looming Tower, and his latest book is more a work of investigative journalism than it is a novel—and it’s horrifyingly prescient. Researched and written long before the emergence of Covid-19, The End of October is filled with information about the history, behavior, and deadly potential of coronaviruses.

Unlike the scourge in this novel, Covid-19 is not an influenza virus, but a novel virus, one never found before in humans. This was also true of the Spanish Influenza of 1918, “a more dreadful adversary than...ever encountered, with victims that could be “fine at lunch, dead by dinner.” Wright’s fictional virus, the Spanish Influenza, and Covid-19 all share a deadly characteristic: They correspond to no previous strain and there’s no built-up immunity to them anywhere in the world.

Like Wright’s invented disaster,  Covid-19 is an RNA virus, part of a group that’s “constantly reinventing themselves over and over again in what’s called a “mutant swarm,” as Ebola did. 

The viral world is a daunting one, found in the ocean as well as on land. “A single liter of seawater contained about 100 billion of them, 90% of them unknown to man.” “More than 800 million viruses,” researchers say, “are deposited every day on every single meter of the earth’s surface. Most...preyed on bacteria, not humans.” 

Viruses are a large part of the natural world whose purpose hasn’t yet been discovered, infecting a cell and then using  “the energy of the cell for reproduction,” eventually turning the infected body “into a virus factory.” And historically viruses come in waves, with  a “cruel intermission” followed by a second wave that’s worse than the first, as was true of the Spanish Influenza.

Wright suggests viruses are a force of nature, untamable, capable of “consuming human history.” The 1918 epidemic took more lives than the combined deaths of combatants during World War I, yet that killer-lnfluenza was essentially erased from history, its terrible lessons ignored.

Perhaps The End of October will awaken humanity to the knowledge of what a pandemic is capable of doing. It could become the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of today’s world, with its fictional narrative drawing its readers’ attention to its careful research and horrifying, illuminating facts. Let us hope.~Janet Brown

Available from ThingsAsian Books

This Way More Better : Stories and Photos from Asia's Back Roads by Karen J. Coates (ThingsAsian Press)

Karen J. Coates loves traveling. You may find this hard to believe but she’s been traveling since she was seven! It’s true. Coates tells us in her own words, “The journey began on the family room floor of a middle-class Midwestern home.” She continues, “There I sat on the green shag carpeting with the pages of National Geographic spread before me.” She tells herself, “I want to go there and there and there. I want to write that and that and that.” 

That is exactly what she does. First, she studies as a grad student in Hanoi, After graduating, she takes a job writing for a newspaper in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and she has been traveling ever since.  You can read her writing in the pages of  National Geographic, Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia, the Wall Street Journal Asia and Fodor’s Travel Guide.

This Way More Better is a collection of her essays covering about a dozen years from 1998 to 2010. Coates and her photojournalist husband, Jerry Redfern, travel extensively throughout Southeast Asia. Their travels take them through Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia  and the newly independent nation of East Timor.  She meets the people and shares their stories, their dreams, their desires, and their way of life. Accompanying many of the essays are black and white and color photos taken by Redfern. 

In 1999, in the Vietnamese border town of Sapa near China, Coates meets Shu, a ten-year-old Hmong girl who is also an innovative entrepreneur. She befriends Coates and her husband and becomes their guide. Conversations are made in broken English and by using gestures. Coates learns that Shu takes tourists on walks and sells the handmade crafts made by her parents. The American duo also make a trip into the forest to see firsthand the effects of the illegal logging industry which supports the villages and families of the Hmong people and other hilltribes. 

In Laos, they visit the famous Plain of Jars, a unique archeological site where over three-thousand jars or stone vessels were discovered. Some of the jars are very large, measuring over nine feet in height and weighing in the tons. They are also informed that the Plain of Jars is considered one of the most dangerous archaeological sites not because of the jars themselves but because of the massive amounts of unexploded ordnance, UXOs that are leftover from the Vietnam War. 

One of the most fascinating stories Coates writes about is Aunty Glen, an Australian woman, friends says runs a homestay in the jungle. The place is located in a small town called Pilok, Thailand, only a few short kilometers away from Myanmar. Coates has never met Aunty Glen but she is told, “She has an oven.” “She bakes cakes.” “They’re the best in Thailand.”. What better excuse does she need to make a visit

You will enjoy this small collection of stories about the people Coates and her husband meet and the places they visit. They meet Dr. Dan, a man who runs a clinic in Dili in East Timor. They are invited to the coronation of Cambodia’s newest king. They sip tea in northern Thailand.

In 2009, Coates receives an unexpected email The sender is none other than Shu, the ten year old Hmong girl, introduced in the first essay of the book. The story of their reunion is a highlight that will stick with you long after you’ve set the book down. 

Each story in this book is unique. Although the essays are not written chronologically, they do have a certain order that is unique to Coates. She sums it up best in her introduction when she says, “Books often offer a vacation from life. I hope, instead, this book takes you traveling.” Bon Voyage! ~Ernie Hoyt

Available from ThingsAsian Books