Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen (Knopf)

Huong comes from Vietnam to New Orleans with two small children. She’s haunted by war, armed with a handful of words in English, hates the word “refugee” and feels a surge of bitter humor when she’s placed in public housing that has been given the name “Versailles.” With an academic husband whose field is French literature, she recognizes the irony. 

In Vietnam, “theirs was a house of love...it was all they ever needed. And with love they would survive.” When Huong receives a postcard telling her to make a new life because her husband will never join them, love is what makes her keep this truth in a hidden box, a secret from her sons--and that love is what keeps this novel from being a dark and tragic story.

Even though her oldest son searches for a different sort of family in a gang of Vietnamese street toughs and her youngest finds affection and mentorship in the gay community, even when her secret comes to light and divides her family, even when one single slap in the face sends her youngest away from home to eventually live in Paris, Huong keeps love alive in a persistent flame, along with her ability to create a stable center in an uncertain world.

“Huong likes emergencies. She thrives on figuring out how to avoid danger, how to stay alive….she would save them all if it came down to it.” And when Katrina falls upon New Orleans, she’s ready. She knows the art of survival, which she anchors with her love.

In a literary world that has provided countless stories of dysfunctional families, Eric Nguyen has written a novel filled with light, hope, and beauty. He presents Huong and her children through their different perspectives, in chapters that skirt despair in favor of radiance. An old Chinese shopkeeper gives the oldest son a bowl of soup and saves him from an act that would have changed his life forever. A used car salesman courts Huong by taking her to an orchard of fruit that she never expected to see in this new country and wins her heart with bunches of sweet, freshly picked longan and a taste of her previous life. The youngest son discovers who he is in a deserted swimming pool, where he and the boy who kisses him are “both stars, the two of them...Floating. Free.”

It’s unusual to find tenderness in a novel nowadays but Nguyen provides it, untainted by saccharine sentimentality. Huong and her children learn where the nature of home resides; “this had become her city,” Huong realizes after spending years in New Orleans, “the place she lived but also a place that lived in her.” And on their different paths, both of her sons find what lives within them.

The radiant truth of those separate voyages toward that discovery is inspiring, humbling, and indelible. Nguyen, in his debut novel, has evoked a gentle yet realistic vision of family life as it could be and as it should be.~Janet Brown

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri {Riverhead Books)

Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station, originally published in Japanese in 2014 as JR 東京上野駅公園口 (JR Tokyo Ueno Eki Kouen Guchi) is set in modern Japan. It was published in English in 2020 by Morgan Giles and won the National Book Award for Translated Literature for that year as well. 

Kazu is dead, but it is through his eyes that we see the everyday comings and goings of people who live in or visit Ueno Park, one of Tokyo’s most popular public parks that houses many museums, shrines, and a zoological garden. As Kazu describes what he sees, he also talks about his own life and how he came to be homeless and living in the park. 

Kazu is philosophical from the beginning as he relates his story. “I used to think life was like a book: you turn the first page, and there’s the next, and as you go on turning page after page, eventually you reach the last one. But life is nothing like a story in a book. There may be words, and the pages may be numbered, but there is no plot. There may be an ending, but there is no end.”

Kazu was born in 1933 in Soma in Fukushima Prefecture. He is married to Setsuko and has a son and a daughter. In order to support his family, Kazu becomes a migrant laborer and goes to Tokyo to help with construction before the coming Summer Olympics which are to be held in Japan for the first time. 

After the Olympics, Kazu is sent to Sendai and continues to work as a migrant laborer to help pay for Koichi’s university tuition as he is studying to become a radiologist. His daughter got married and currently lives in Sendai as well. Kouichi had just passed his radiology exam but a few days later, Kazu receives a call from his wife informing him that their son has died. 

Tragedy seems to follow Kazu even after he returns to his hometown. Setsuko passes away at the age of sixty-five. His granddaughter Mari worries about him and suggests that Kazu come live with her but Kazu thinks it’s improper to live with a twenty-one year old woman and heads back to Tokyo. He leaves a note telling Mari not to come looking for him. 

The last station on the train line that Kazu takes ends at Ueno Station. This is where he has come to die but as he becomes one of the many homeless living in a tent village in Ueno Park and before he knows it, he has been living there for over five years. 

Tragedy strikes again when Kazu hears of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake which causes a tsunami that wiped out many towns along the coast of Northern Japan. One of the victims of the tsunami is his granddaughter Mari and her pet dog.After the sudden death of his only friend in Ueno Park, Kazu falls into despair and makes a grand decision that may shock the reader. 

Yu Miri writes about the harsh reality of the underside of Tokyo. She shows us what the government of Japan does not want to acknowledge. The invisible people, the marginalized, the homeless. She reminds us through the voice of Kazu that most homeless people do not choose to be homeless. We hear the voice of another homeless person saying, “I can’t believe I became homeless...Having passersby look at me like I’m something dirty…” We may feel the pain and agony of Kazu and wonder what direction we would have taken? ~Ernie Hoyt

Life isn't all ha ha hee hee by Meera Syal (Anchor Books)

Meera Syal is a British actor and writer whose parents came from India. She was born in Wolverhampton and grew up in the small town of Essington in Staffordshire. Her family was the only Asian family in the area and she uses this experience as a backdrop to her 1999 novel Life isn’t all ha ha hee hee which was also adapted into a three-part television mini-series in 2005. 

The story centers around three childhood friends who continue to have a strong bond as adults in their thirties living in London. They are Chila, Sunita, and Tania. Sunita is the oldest of the three. She dropped out of university and married her psychotherapist Akash and has two kids. Tania is an ambitious career woman working in television who speaks her mind and doesn’t think much of her Punjabi roots and currently lives with her Caucasion boyfriend, Martin. Chila is the youngest of the three and is just getting married to one of the most eligible bachelors and the man of her dreams - Deepak Sharma. 

Deepak used to be a ladie’s man and has a long history of having many girlfriends, including Tania. His family is happy that he has chosen a nice Punjabi girl and not one of the blondes he used to flaunt when he was younger, however, things get complicated when Tania makes a film about the love lives of ordinary Indian people, mostly using her friends and not exactly showing them in the best light. The premiere is a success but has unforeseen consequences. 

The bonds of friendship are rattled when Tania and Deepak share a passionate kiss after having an argument at the film’s premiere. They are seen by Chila, Sunita, and Martin. Martin soon leaves Tania. Chila and Sunita no longer speak to Tania but Chila refuses to bring up the matter with Deepak and Deepak takes no responsibility for his actions.

Although Tania’s film was successful and critically acclaimed, it’s consequences were not just relegated to her close friends but to the Indian community as well. The new production company which hired her wants her to make similar films but Tania no longer wants to make movies about “her people”. In order to appease her colleagues, she tries to get an interview with Jasbinder Singh, a woman whose husband wouldn’t grant her a divorce and doused himself and their children with gasoline and lit himself on fire in front of her. 

Chila gives birth to a son but refuses to let her husband see him. By chance, Tania meets  up with her two friends in the hospital and the three reform their bond as Deepak makes a surprise appearance and Chila’s son is nowhere to be found!

Syal gives us an interesting insight into the immigrant experience of how three modern day Indian women live with one foot in London while the other remains in the tradition of their Punjabi roots. All three women want to live independent and happy lives but they try their hardest to find a balance between where they want to be and where their husbands and relatives think they should be. 

The lives of these three women may be the same for a number of women who find themselves in the same situation where the man believes he is the head of the household and what he says is law as they all try to find a balance in pleasing their husbands and boyfriends but not at the cost of their own happiness. Men should take notes and learn to respect women and not treat their wives or girlfriends like second-class citizens. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Sweetest Fruits by Monique Truong (Viking)

Each of the women who loved Lafcadio Hearn called him by a different name.

His father named him Patrick. His mother added Lafcadio, to identify his birthplace, the Ionian town of Lefkada, on an island that bore the same name. But to her, he was always Patricio, “who was born hungry,” and until she took him to his father’s relatives in Ireland, this was the only name he knew. There he became Patrick. The gold earrings he had worn from birth were stripped from his ears, and his memories of warm sunlight, the hills covered with golden ginestra blossoms, the flavor of garlic, all faded away, but not “the dark and beautiful face--with large brown eyes like a wild deer’s.” He cherished the memory of his vanished mother, saying “I would rather have her portrait than a fortune.”

He left Ireland as soon as he could, finding his way to Cincinnati where he launched his writing career as a journalist. It was here that he met Alethea Foley, the daughter of a slave and a plantation owner who made her living as a talented cook in a boarding house and it was she who called the new boarder Pat.  The two of them traded stories, fell in love, and managed to circumvent miscegenation laws by getting married. Inevitably their union fell apart when the world intervened. Pat made his way to New Orleans where he was became a writer who was known as Lafcadio.

As Lafcadio, he met the reporter who would become his biographer, Elizabeth Bisland, a journalist who achieved fame by racing Nellie Bly—and losing—in traveling around the world in eighty days.  She describes the man who would be her friend for his entire life as “most unusual and memorable...five foot three inches in height...with an almost feminine grace and lightness in his step and movements... abnormally shy.” He had, she says, “an astounding sensitiveness” that “drove him to flight,” and it was this perhaps that took him to Japan.

In a country where he never truly learned its language, Koizumi Yakumo found a kind of safety and came to life. Here he met and married Koizimi Setsu, who became his interpreter, guide, and storyteller. With the birth of their first child, he became a legal subject of Japan to ensure that his wife and children wouldn’t lose their Japanese citizenship. It was no sacrifice. As Yakumo, a member of the Koizumi family, he was given a home from which he had no desire for flight.

Through the voices of Hearn’s mother and his two wives, Monique Truong has stitched together an oblique but vivid portrait of a somewhat vampiric writer, a man who soaked up other people’s stories and made them his own. Truong’s poetic narrative is underpinned by portions of the biography wriiten soon after his death by Elizabeth Bisland, which was largely based upon Hearn’s own version of his life. Through eight years of exacting research and travel, including the discovery of an English translation of Koizumi Setsu’s memoir of her husband (Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn), Truong has created a work of beauty and brilliance, one that transcends Hearn’s life and enriches it at the same time.~Janet Brown

Kensuke's Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo (Egmont)

Michael was lost at sea ten years ago. He was only eleven. It would be ten years after his rescue that he would share his story. Such is the premise of Kensuke's Kingdom, winner of the Children’s Book Award and written by Michael Morpurgo. 

Michael’s family consists of him, his mother and father, and his pet sheepdog, Stella Artois, Michael had a paper route on Saturdays. On Sundays, the family would go dinghy sailing at the city’s reservoir. His father worked at the brickworks and his mother worked part-time at the brickworks office until their family received “the letter” which would change their lives. 

“The letter” was a notice to inform them that the brickworks was closing down. Michael’s parents looked for other jobs but there was nothing. The family was falling apart. His parents were not speaking to each other and when they did they would be arguing about little things. 

Then, one Saturday, Michael’s world changes. He finds his mother at home crying because his Father sold the family car and said they would be moving south. Michael had never seen his mother in this state. She said it was because of him that their father had this crazy idea. 

She tells him what his father said to her. “There’s only one lousy wage coming into this house - Michael’s paper money.” Father tells his wife, “How do you think that makes me feel, eh? My son’s eleven years old. He’s got a job and I haven’t!”. 

Father’s big plan was to make his dream into reality. He had enough money to buy a yacht named Peggy Sue. He prepared for everything, even Michael’s education. At first, the sailing goes well as the family visits Brazil, Africa and Australia. It isn’t until they hit a storm in the Coral Sea where Michael and his dog fall overboard. 

Michael and Stella wash up on a deserted island and must use his wits to survive on his own. He has no food and water and believes that his time is up and accepts the fact that he will die. However, when he wakes, he finds a plate of fish and fruit and some drinking water provided. Now he knows he is not alone. 

It doesn’t take long for Michael to discover the only other inhabitant on the island. A man whose language he doesn’t understand and who uses words he’s never heard of - Dameda! Yamero! Abunai! At their first encounter, the only thing Michael learns is that the man’s name is Kensuke. 

One day Michael goes swimming in the ocean only and is stung by a large and poisonous jellyfish. It’s Kensuke that nurses Michael back to health and they begin to form a fragile friendship as Kensuke asks Michael to teach him English. 

Once the two can communicate, Michael learns that Kensuke is Japanese man from Nagasaki.  He learns about Kensuke’s family history. How Kensuke joined the Imperial Navy and believes his wife and only son died in the bombing of Nagasaki and how he’s been stranded on the island since the end of the war but has nothing to go back to in Japan. 

Kensuku’s Kingdom is a story of survival and friendship. It’s about creating new bonds and keeping promises and protecting what one deems important. The story may remind you of Gary Pausen’s Hatchet in which a young boy must survive the wilderness on his own. Michael may not be alone on the island but he learns what is most important in life. It is something we should not take for granted. ~Ernie Hoyt

Xi’an Famous Foods by Jason Wang with Jessica K. Chou, photographs by Jenny Huang (Abrams Books)

“There’s a tall, old white dude with a film crew. Do you know who he is?” David Shi, the owner of Xi’an Famous Foods in Queens, is probably one of the few people in New York City in 2011 who would have to ask that question. His son Jason Wang gives him the answer. The old white dude is Anthony Bourdain and the film crew with him is going to propel this small restaurant in a Flushing shopping mall into a culinary destination with worldwide fame.

Shi brought his family to the U.S. from China when his son was only seven but the little boy was already claimed by the strong flavors of black vinegar and cumin-dusted lamb skewers. He had come from a city that was once a major stop on the Silk Road and had developed its own cuisine with the addition of Middle Eastern ingredients: lamb and “earthy spices like cardamom and star anise.” Jason Wang left a “city of fiery desert food” for a country where soy sauce was an exotic item on supermarket shelves. His father discovered that Chinese restaurants in the U.S. served food that would never be found in China. He supported his family by cooking sweet, bland dishes in cities across the East Coast, working at a circuit of different restaurants for years.

Wang soon became homesick for the street food he’d known since birth. As soon as he was tall enough to see over the top of a barbecue grill, he began to recreate the lamb skewers that haunted his taste buds. Adding cumin and salt, he successfully replicated the flavor that he longed for. Obviously, his future in food was already set in place, although it took him time to realize that.

Anyone who has eaten the food of Xi’an will never forget its taste and textures. Xi capitalized on that distnctive cuisine after he moved his family to the Chinese city of Flushing, a district of Queens that has become the borough’s culinary capital. Growing from a streetside stall near a shopping plaza to “a mini empire of stores all across New York City,” Xi’an Famous Foods has turned cumin-lamb noodles into a New York dish that’s become as popular as pizza or bagels.

Wang pays homage to his birthplace with photographs (taken by Jenny Huang) and stories that are as enticing as the recipes that have come from the city of Xi’an. He reveals the bounty of the  Xi Cang street market as he remembers it, long before it became a tourist attraction that sells deep fried scorpions to crowds of out-of-towners. He teasingly exults over a childhood favorite spot that’s still in business, selling lamb dumplings in vinegar, while refusing to divulge its location, and is thrilled when he finds shops that only make the “daily bread of Xi’an,” fried in a skillet and served warm. He pays homage to the kitchens of his grandparents and offers The No-Frills Guide to Xi’an as a Tourist: a launching pad to this city whose history has been shaped by thirteen dynasties.

Xi’an Famous Foods is more than a cookbook, despite its extraordinary collection of recipes and its detailed instructions on how to follow them.  Wang has written a family history and a tribute to a rapidly changing center of Chinese culture, as well as to the Chinese outpost in New York that launched his family’s success.  On so many different levels, his book is an inspiration--to eat different kinds of food, to make it at home, to visit the banquet of Xi’an food hat exists in New York, and to explore the place where it all came from—”the swirling of cultures in Xi’an.”~Janet Brown

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha (Ballantine Books)

The quest for beauty and the hunger for family dominate the lives of five young women who live within the same building in Seoul’s famous Gangnam neighborhood. 

Ajuri, who lost her voice in a childhood fight with schoolmates, earns her living  in a hair salon, making other women beautiful. Her roommate and childhood friend, Sujin, calls her “the little mermaid,” who communicates solely with pen, paper, and the gift of touch. Without speech, Ajuri has sharpened her other senses beyond what they had been before she became mute;  “the wind,” she says, “I don’t remember it having so many shades of sound.” 

Sujin and Miho grew up together in the same orphanage. Their lives diverged when Miho’s artistic talent took her to live for years in Manhattan. When she returns to Seoul, Sujin urges her to live in the “office-tel” building,” with its desirable zip code and proximity to the subway. Miho, seeing this as a place “for the unfettered”, becomes roommates with a stranger, Kyuri.

Kyuri works in one of Seoul’s most prestigious “room salons,” one that is known as a “10 percent,” employing only the prettiest 10 percent of the girls who make conversation and pour drinks for men who “pay to act as bloated kings.” “Electrically beautiful,” Ajuri describes her neighbor, while Miho sees her as “painfully plastic.” Kyuri has paid a borrowed fortune for her skin that “gleams like pure glass” and her features that have been sculpted into a replica of a popular Korean singer. Trapped in debt, she is haunted by her “expiration date” and thinks of moving to Hong Kong or New York, where beauty is measured by a less demanding standard.

Sujin yearns for Kyuri’s face and the chance it will give her to become a room salon girl, even though she knows it will take at least six months for her to recover from the surgery. The reshaping is a brutal process that makes Sujin mask her lower face to hide the swelling and the numbness that makes her drool as though she was shot up with novocain. But when her beauty begins to bloom, she claims the happiness that eludes Kyuri.

These girls are the reason why a young wife decides to move into the office-tel. She’s magnetized by the glimpses she sees of their closeness and their freedom, an intimacy and mobility that she’s never had. Wonna, after a long series of miscarriages, guards her most recent pregnancy with fierce possessiveness, yearning for the daughter who will give her a family of her own.

Within the framework of these lives, Frances Cha gives a view of modern Korean life with the perspective of an American outsider and the trained eye of a professional journalist. She shows the extraordinary wealth and power of Korea’s upper class in a single sentence, when an heiress approached by a stranger on the street, says to her companion, “Maybe I can have him killed.” “Korea is the size of a fishbowl,” Miho observes, “Someone is always looking down on someone else.” Economic class is difficult to transcend, which makes beauty a necessity. 

But beauty gives a fleeting advantage, accompanied by a crippling loan that’s taken on with little thought. “It is easy to leap when you have no choice,” Kyuri remarks. 

Many women face the prospect of old age without children who will provide emotional and financial support. Korean firms offer maternity leaves that can last at least for three months and as long as a year, something they do their best to avoid providing. The cost of bringing up a child can be astronomical.  Parents who don’t qualify for free government daycare can end up paying huge amounts for child care. Peer pressure makes them buy budget-draining robots who read aloud to children from books that come in sets of 30-50, air purifiers for gigantic baby-strollers, and “pastel bumper beds with tents.” “All these ob-gyns and birthing centers and post-partum centers are going out of business because nobody is having children.” Kyuri says. Meanwhile hospitals devoted to cosmetic surgery attract patients from all over the world and a never-ending supply of room salon girls.

Artifice, for Cha’s characters, is an established fact of life. Elaborate weddings with hundreds of guests confer a fragile status upon wives who wait for husbands to come home from the girls in room salons. Cha strips away myths that proclaim the strength of family and the privileges of beauty,  revealing a glittering, lonely world where women learn to support each other.~Janet Brown

The Binding Chair by Kathryn Harrison (4th Estate)

Foot binding: An ancient Chinese custom of tightly binding the feet of young girls to make their feet as small as possible. The practice continued well into the beginning of the 20th century. Bound feet were considered a status symbol and also as a mark of beauty. They were also known as lotus feet. 

Kathryn Harrison, the writer who shocked the world with her semi-autobiographical novel The Kiss, describing her incestuous but consenting affair with her father, has written a story set in turn of the century China. The Binding Chair opens with eleven people answering an ad placed by one Mrs. Arthur Cohen. “Whatever the name Mrs. Cohen might suggest to someone answering an ad, May would not have been it. To begin with, wasn’t Cohan a Jewish name? And there she was unmistakably Chinese.”

How does a Chinese woman end up living in France while married to an Englishman? The story flashes back to when May was five years old and she was still known as Chao-tsing. This is the year that her grandmother took charge of May’s feet. May’s mother who remembered the pain of having her own foot bound could not find the courage to do the same to her daughter. The matriarchal grandmother tells May’s mother, “The choice is this, either Chao-tsing will grow up to be the bride of a prosperous merchant, or she will be as large-footed as a barbarian and find no husband at all!”.

As May gets older, May’s traditional grandmother sets about looking for a perfect match to marry off her granddaughter. She is soon married to a rich merchant and looks forward to a bright future. Unfortunately, May discovers that she is the youngest and also the fourth wife of the man. She is also resented by the other wives and is virtually ignored by her new husband for weeks on end. When he does show up, he treats her brutally often using her as nothing more than a sex-toy.

Chao-tsing manages to escape the house with the help of one of the servants. She reaches the bright lights of Shanghai where she finds a job in a brothel. She tells the proprietress that she’s will to work and do anything for various clients under one condition - no Chinese! It is at the brothel where she meets Arthur for the first time. Their initial encounter is not quite friendly but when Arthur sees her bound foot, he becomes obsessed with them. 

I have never given any thought to feet-binding and as with May’s husband Arthur, assumed it was a foot whose growth was somehow prevented. Arthur learns that this is not so. “A bound foot is a foot broken: a foot folded in the middle, toes forced down toward the heel.” I cannot make any judgments on why small feet were considered beautiful in China. American standards of beauty are suggested by the images of women we see in magazine ads or on television. In other cultures, it may be face tattoos, henna, or lip plates. In China, it was bound feet.

The relationship between May and her family sets you on an emotional rollercoaster that will at times pull at your heartstrings. The suffering women had to go through to please their families and husband is still relevant today as it was during May’s time. Fortunately, the practice of foot-binding has long been outlawed. No women should have to endure pain and suffering just to find happiness. ~Ernie Hoyt