Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-1945 by Barbara W. Tuchman (Random House)

Joseph Stilwell loved China. From his first visit in 1911, when he spent seventeen days traveling through a country that was racked with revolution, he soaked up everything he could with complete gusto. 

By the time the Qing Dynasty was replaced by Sun Yat-sen’s Republic, China was a country that still lived in the Middle Ages. While western countries applauded a new age of freedom and democracy under the new republic, the fledgling government was faced with a population of 400,000,000 that was 70-80 per cent illiterate, in a country that was largely without sanitation, running water, electricity, or a transportation system that wasn’t “conducted by human muscle.” When Stilwell returned to China after World War I, little had changed but the reigning players. Sun Yat-sen was dead and three warlords battled for supremacy against the Nationalist forces of the Republic, the Kuomintang, led by Sun’s protege, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. By 1928, Chiang’s forces had prevailed, the General was in control of the government, while Japanese influence was making itself known in Manchuria. 

The stage was being set for a military, political, and psychological disaster that would take place over many blood-soaked years and would drag China into the 20th century. The three main players were the Generalissimo, President Franklin Roosevelt, and the stubborn Yankee soldier. Joe Stilwell.

When the Japanese invaded China, the Domino Theory was born. If China fell, so would all of Asia. Southeast Asia was already being devoured by Japan and within China, two battles were raging, one against the Japanese and one against Communist rebels who had broken with the Kuomintang. Although Roosevelt was reluctant to send troops to Asia, Pearl Harbor drew him into war, with the defense of China becoming a paramount issue. Stilwell, who had made a name for himself both as an unconventional military tactician and a knowledgeable Old China Hand, was designated as commander of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops. Unfortunately nobody had clarified that point with the Generalissimo.

Roosevelt’s family fortune was based on the China Trade;  his mother’s family kept a home in Hong Kong and Roosevelt’s Hyde Park home was sprinkled with looted Chinese treasures. “Because his ancestors had traded with the Chinese he had always had the deepest sympathy with the Chinese people,” he claimed. His point of view was colonial and his naivete was crippling, leading to the Lend-Lease Act that guaranteed an unrestricted flow of war materiel into China, $700 million dollars worth to start. For years China received all that it asked for under the U.S. aim of creating “Chinese military self-sufficiency”.

However, “the American purpose was not the Chinese purpose.” Chiang had no intention of launching offensives against the Japanese Army; his goal for China was to “strengthen itself with American arms and money.” To Chiang, the primary danger wasn’t the Japanese but the Communists. His strategy was to let the Allies do the fighting. He was saving the Lend-Lease money and weapons and his soldiers for the battle that would come later, against the forces of Mao Tse-tung.

Meanwhile Roosevelt’s romantic view and idealistic trust in Chiang Kai-shek’s China became American propaganda, merrily spread through the U.S press and adopted by the American people. For three years, hundreds of millions of dollars in money and weaponry were sent to China, and were taken by Chiang, not as a loan, but as a form of reparations for past Western crimes against his country. It slowly became clear that “ even the United States was not rich enough to fight in China.”

Pitted against Roosevelt’s absurd ignorance and the bottomless greed of Chiang Kai-shek was Stilwell. Nominally in charge of Lend-Lease largesse and ostensibly the military commander of all the troops in China, this straight-talking Yankee was miserably out of his depth. He had no diplomatic skills and had mortally insulted Chiang Kai-shek at the start of their ill-fated relationship by scoffing at Chiang’s order to provide one watermelon for every four men in Burma at the height of their losing battle against the Japanese. (This, according to Madame Chiang years later, was “bitterly and openly contemptuous” and poisoned any possible meeting of the minds between Stilwell and the Generalissimo.)

Stilwell lacked the polished skill of Lord Mountbatten who had delighted the Chiangs with flattery and a Cartier vanity case monogrammed in diamonds for the demanding Madame Chiang. He managed to offend Mountbatten as well,  by disdaining his lordship’s offer to divert Stilwell’s troops with the talents of Noel Coward. (Coward came and was an absolute flop with the GIs, leading Stilwell to announce “If any more piano players start this way, you know what to do with the piano.”)

Stilwell also labored under the New England creed that a man’s word was his bond and Chiang played upon that viciously, msking promises and then altering them to the point of nonexistence. In spite of the morass of corruption, greed, and lies that he waded through, “Vinegar Joe” continued to be convinced that the Chinese soldiers were capable of greatness, if only he were allowed to lead them. He proved that with the seizure of Mytkina in Burma, while leading Chinese troops in addition to those from the  British and American armies. 

It’s a tragedy that Stilwell’s passion for China led to the waste of his military talents during World War II. A year after witnessing the surrender of Japan, he died of abdominal cancer. On the day before his death, General Stilwell was given the only honor he had always wanted, the Combat Infantryman Badge, “reserved for the enlisted foot soldier who proved himself under fire.” 

A final honor that Stilwell would have relished came several days after he died. His widow was told she had a visitor at her California home, a man who identified himself only as “the Christian.”. She came downstairs to find “the huge figure and the cannonball head of Feng Yu-hsiang”, a Chinese warlord  who had fought with Stilwell.  Using her husband’s Chinese name, Feng said to her, “I have come to mourn with you for Shih Te-wei, my friend.”.~Janet Brown

Bangkok 8 by John Burdett (Vintage)

John Burdett’s crime thriller, Bangkok 8, takes all the cliches you can think of about Thailand and Bangkok in particular, and creates one of the most hilarious mysteries that blends traditional Thai culture with the fast paced life of the 21st century. There are corrupt cops, Buddhist practitioners, bar girls and kathoeys, which are best described as transgenders. There are also  Khmer thugs, drug dealers, the gem trade and snakes, lots of them.

This is the first book in a series featuring former yaa-baa, the Thai word for methamphetamine, user-turned detective, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, the son of a Thai bar girl and an American Vietnam War vet he has never met. His mother refuses to give him any information about his father. Sonchai’s partner in crime is Pichai. After killing their yaa-baa dealer, their mothers were able to get them an interview with an abbot of a forest monastery in the far north of Thailand. After six months, the abbot told them they were going to mend their karma by becoming honest cops. 

The abbot’s youngest brother is a cop named Vikorn who is the chief of District 8 in Krung Thep, more commonly known as Bangkok. Corruption wasn’t allowed to Sonchai and Pichai and If the two friends want “to escape the murderer’s hell, they would not only have to be honest cops but they would have to be arhat cops.” Simply put, an arhat is someone who has attained the goal of enlightenment. 

Sonchai and his partner have been assigned to follow an American marine driving a black Mercedes-Benz. The two lose the car for a moment but when they rediscover it, the marine is alone and doesn’t seem to be moving. Sonchai’s partner checks the car only to discover a large python is wrapped around the marine and is busily trying to swallow his head. There are also many cobras in the car and one of them has bitten Pichai in the eye causing his death. 

Sonchai is now determined to find who is responsible for his partner’s death and makes the claim that he will kill whoever was behind it. As the victim was a citizen of the United States and a Marine, Sonchai is told he would be working with an American FBI agent who turns out to be a beautiful woman named Kimberly Jones and who seems to be taken in my Sonchai’s charm. 

The further the two investigate, they discover the marine’s name is Bradley and finds that he is involved in the trading and selling of jade, more precisely, forged artworks of jade. It also seems that Bradley was involved in the illicit drug trade as well. If it wasn’t for the death of Sonchai’s partner, it would have been an open and shut case of a drug deal gone bad but the deeper Sonchai and Jones dig, the more the plot thickens as it leads to a man who is friends with Presidents and Senators and he is someone who has a dirty habit that’s not fit for print. 

The uninitiated reader may find offense at Burdett’s description of the Royal Thai Police Force which in his novel is ninety-nine percent corrupt with only Sonchai and his former partner being the only two true honest cops. Burdett says in his foreword, “I hope that any Thai cop who comes across these frivolous pages will see humor rather than slight. This is an entertainment within a very Western genre and nothing more. No offense is intended.” 

I’m not a Thai cop but even I can see that his story is full of humor and is not to be taken seriously and you can’t help but want to read about Sonchai’s next adventure. ~Ernie Hoyt

The China Option: A Guide for Millennials by Sophia Erickson (Travelers’ Tales)

After a two-month stay in Shenzhen where I wallowed in ignorance, I stopped reading travel guides to China. They’re useless for the sort of traveler that I am, the kind that stays in one place for as long as possible and tries to learn as much as they can during their extended visit. If it weren’t for the covid lockdown and a dearth of things to read, I probably never would have picked up Sophia Erickson’s guide on “How to Work, Play, & Find Success in China”. And that would have been a crying shame, as is the fact that her book wasn’t published until 2018, a year after my Shenzhen interlude. 

Although the target audience for Erickson’s book is easily fifty years younger than I, intended for recent college graduates who might want to take a job in China, I began to take notes by the time I reached the 55th page. At least two-thirds of the information she provides is valuable for travelers as well as for potential expatriates. If you aren’t planning to stay in high-end hotels that are branded with names like Hyatt or Hilton, if you aren’t planning to hire a guide, a car, and a driver, you really need this book.

Ordinary guidebooks will advise readers to get a VPN for their time in China. Erickson gives a list of the ones she considers most useful, as well as what they will cost, with the added caveat that this list is one that constantly changes. It does however provide a launching pad for an informed search.

Easily as crucial as a VPN is Baidu Maps. Although it’s only available in Chinese, if an address is entered in its search field, arrows appear to show the direction in which the place lies. Since Google Maps is useless in China, this app is essential. So is Pieco, an app that offers a free dictionary and translation service. And WeChat is a lifesaver, “ a sort of hybrid of WhatsApp and Facebook” that’s a social necessity in China.

Erickson tells how and where to buy a Chinese sim card, how to open a Chinese bank account, and why life will be much easier if you have one. She explains why a Western credit card will often be useless, and gives careful instructions on how to set up AliPay and WeChat Wallet, which are needed in the multitude of places that only accept payment via QR codes. She even tells how to buy Bitcoin and why you might want to.

Some features of daily living in China are ones that travelers also need to know: the dangers of drinking fake alcohol (yes, you can go blind--or die), which hospitals are preferable in case of an accident, and the eight cities that “regularly meet” WHO’s air pollution standards. (Sorry, neither Beijing nor Shanghai make the cut.) 

Although this isn’t a travel guide, even expats leave town once in a while.  Erickson gives detailed information on train travel, from which kind of train to choose to how to buy a ticket, how to travel by bus, and the plusses and minuses of group travel. She tells how to get a three-month Provisional Driver’s License (no test necessary other than one for eyesight), and the essential permits for travel in Tibet--not to worry--the mandatory travel guide will take care of this, as well as finding the required private car and driver. She also gives a list of “reputable travel agencies” who will organize your Tibet trip.

Now all that’s needed is the ability to travel in China again. Here’s where being a millennial has its advantages. They’ll probably live to see that day. For us septuagenarians, all we can do is cross our fingers and try to remain optimistic that we’ll be able to take advantage of Erickson’s advice. Speed that day.~Janet Brown

Before the Deluge : The Vanishing World of the Yangtze's Three Gorges by Deirdre Chetham (Palgrave Macmillan)

After graduating from Harvard, Deirdre Chetham went on to study anthropology at Columbia University. She became interested in the Three Gorges “when China was taking its first steps toward economic and political opening”. As she was trying to decide on her thesis topic and where in China to do her field work, she made a chance meeting with an employee of Lindblad Travel, a luxury tour company whose ships often traveled along the Yangtze River.  The company hired Chetham who believed she was qualified to lecture on Chinese archeology. 

Since then, Chetham has spent more than twenty years traveling up and down the Yangtze River. She has “attempted to provide a glimpse of the history and the current situation of a remote area, as the people who live here stand on the brink of immense personal and social disruption”.

Before the Deluge was first published in 2002. The subtitle of her book is The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges. It is the story of the planning and building of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. Chetham follows the project throughout history. A project that was first suggested by Dr. Sun Yat-Sen in 1919. He said the goal was to industrialize the nation and improve navigation. 

Chetham continues discussing the history of the dam from the beginning of its construction under Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, followed by the Japanese occupation who surveyed the Three Gorges and came up with the Otani plan, a dam project that would continue after Japan’s anticipated victory. Chetham also hits upon the vicarious truce between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government and the communist government as they banded together to oust the occupying Japanese. The nationalist government then invited the U.S. to help them on the project. 

Unfortunately, the Chinese Civil War started and construction of the dam was halted for another number of years. The plans for the Three Gorges Dam dam once again became national news during the eighties under Deng Xiaoping’s government. This time, progress seemed to be more or a reality than just a project on paper. 

Chetham had interviewed a number of people who would be affected by the construction of the dam but most of the locals seemed to view the project as yet another ambitious ploy by the Chinese government to show the world that China wasn’t an undeveloped country. They informed Chetham they survived the suffering caused by the Cultural Revolution, so a mass displacement would just be another hardship they would be forced to endure.

The dam was completed in 2006, four years after the publication of this book, and became fully functional in the summer of 2012. As of 2012, it has been the world’s largest power station in relation to installed capacity which is the amount of energy that a power station, or in this case, a dam, can produce. 

Before the Deluge is a fascinating history of one of man’s greatest projects ever undertaken. The environmental impact and the loss of archeological and cultural artifacts is still being debated today. The dam continues to raise the question for every developing country - should development in the name of progress take priority over the loss of culture and the displacement of a large number of its citizens? Do the benefits outweigh the negative impact on the people and the area? And most importantly, are the benefits of such a project sustainable? Only the future will be able to tell us. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Delightful Life of an Expat Crime Writer: Fifteen Journeys with Colin Cotterill and Dr. Siri (Soho Press)

Who would imagine that Hercule Poirot could ever be displaced by an unqualified coroner in his seventies who lives in Laos during the 1970s-80s? Or even more surprising, who would imagine that a middle-aged cartoonist with a background in physical education who lives in the depths of Thailand would become one of the English-speaking world’s leading crime writers? 

In 2004, Soho Press published a quiet little mystery called The Coroner’s Lunch that introduced Dr. Siri Paiboon, a medical doctor who becomes national coroner for the country of Laos simply because he is one of the few surviving physicians. Dr. Siri accepts the offer that he really couldn’t refuse and makes the acquaintance of his forensic team, a young nurse with a flair for foreign languages and an assistant with Downs Syndrome. Fortunately both Nurse Dtui and Mr. Geung have absorbed the finer points of Dr. Siri’s new profession. Siri’s contribution to the coroner’s office is a highly developed sense of skepticism and a distaste for bureaucratic obfuscation, which proves useful in the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. He also learns that he has an invisible posse dogging his heels—a collection of spirits from the Great Beyond—who both help and hinder what becomes his real vocation. Siri is unable to view a cadaver without discovering its true cause of death and this leads him to amateur detective work, for which he has a natural flair. Joined by Chief Inspector Phosy and a friend of his youth, the irascible Civilai, Dr. Siri makes his way through fifteen books, solving crimes in a leisurely and amiable fashion.

The books that chronicle his crime career are permeated with the placid, unhurried pace of Laos time and many delightfully sarcastic jokes, along with those pesky spirits getting in the way. Over time, the characters grow older and happier. Siri falls in love with Daeng, a gorgeous septuagenarian noodle seller who learned the fine art of killing during the American War, and Dtui and Phosy become a couple. Even Mr. Geung finds love. 

Through the years, the books deepen with historical research, which has all but taken over the latest volume, The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot. When Dr. Siri is sent a package that contains a diary, with the first half written in Japanese and the second in Lao, this provides a serial drama, chapter by chapter, as Siri reads it aloud to Daeng every evening. Gradually an invisible character tries to dominate the book and Siri and Daeng go off to find why the journal ends so abruptly and who the writer truly was.

Suddenly the book becomes suffused with a kamikaze pilot, the Nanjing massacre, the Japanese occupation of Laos, and a fascinating but deeply disgusting pantheon of Japanese ghosts. Siri and Daeng have to work overtime to keep control of the plot but with fourteen earlier adventures under their belts, they’re more than equal to the task.

A man who has given the world fifteen volumes of Dr. Siri in sixteen years, Colin Cotterill is a master of the shaggy dog story, where the punch line is almost incidental to the plentiful and fascinating details. His characters have made these books irresistible, to the point that when the killer is discovered, it’s difficult to care. What draws his readers back are the members of this eccentric, delightful community—oh, and the titles help too. I Shot the Buddha. Curse of the Pogo Stick. Don’t Eat Me. (Cotterill was incensed when Soho said he couldn’t use The Devil’s Vagina for one of Siri’s mysteries. Whatever replaced it was much less memorable than the original, which was a direct translation of the name of a plant that grows in Laos.)

The real mystery at the heart of his latest book comes in a note of thanks at its very beginning. “This last book in the Dr. Siri series,” Cotterill says and ends his thanks with Sayonara. However since Dr. Siri is still alive at the book’s end, let’s hope the man meant “latest,” not “last” and that Sayonara is simply a form of homage to the Suicide Pilot. After all, Siri has the spirit world on his side and his creator has only “a number of deranged dogs,” a truth to which I can testify. I’m putting my money on the eventual reappearance of Dr. Siri.~Janet Brown

Seventeen by Hideo Yokoyama (Riverrun)

First published in Japanese as Climber’s High by Bungei Shunju Ltd in 2003. It was also adapted into a film of the same name in 2008. Seventeen is Hideo Yokoyama’s second novel to be published in English, his first being the crime/mystery novel Six Four. The story is set in two time frames - 1985 and 2002 and blends fiction with an actual event. Yokoyama uses his background as an investigative journalist and creates a story of a small-town journalist covering one of Japan’s worst airline disasters.

On August 12, 1985, Japan Airlines Flight 123 from Haneda Airport to Osaka crashed in a mountainous area of Gunma Prefecture killing the entire fifteen-member crew and 504 of the 509 passengers. It is considered one of the deadliest single-aircraft accidents in aviation history. In his foreword, Yokoyama relates what he witnessed at the crash site. 

“I arrived at the crash site after trekking for more than eight hours up a mountain with no routes or climbing trails. The terrain was steep, unimaginably narrow, and it was the rare lucky reporter who didn’t inadvertently step on a corpse. After sundown, I spent a night on the mountain, surrounded by body parts that no longer resembled anything human”.

Kazumasa Yuuki is a veteran reporter for the North Kanto Times, a local newspaper based in Gunma Prefecture. For years he worked the police beat. Although he is married and has two children, he is away from home most of the time and is estranged from his thirteen-year old son Jun. The story opens with Kazu getting off a train at the base of Mount Tanigawa, also known as the Devil’s Mountain. He was supposed to climb the Tsuitate Face with his friend Kyoichiro Anzai seventeen years ago and still wonders about the last words he heard his friend say, “I climb up to step down.”

Seventeen years ago, on the day Yuuki was getting ready to climb the mountain, a wire from the news service came in stating that, “It appears that Japan Air Lines Flight 123 has crashed on the Nagano-Gunma prefectural border.”  The newspaper office goes into turmoil and Yuuki is assigned as the JAL Crash Desk Chief. This tragedy brings the newsroom together and there are high hopes for the paper to get a real scoop before all the national publications. 

What follows is an adrenaline-filled chaos as Yuuki tries to organize and delegate assignments for the story and to coordinate with the other departments to get the story ready for print as soon as it is possible. We get a first-hand glimpse of the politics involved with various departments as well as the different factions supporting politicians on opposing parties. 

The story is more about how the news is handled and presented than it is about the crash itself. It isn’t only about the characters, but the ethics of what’s appropriate or not. Are the deaths of people in a major disaster more important to the media than the death of an individual that has little to no value to a newspaper? 

“There are big lives and little lives, aren’t there? Heavy lives and lightweight lives, and lives that are...not.” 

It’s definitely something to think about. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City by Juan Du (Harvard University Press)

To any traveler who goes beyond the Central Business District of Shenzhen and explores it through its vast spiderweb of subway lines, this city seems inexplicable. Once the central core with its dazzling towers is left behind, what’s left is a sprawl of disparate clumps of urbanity, like a gigantic follow-the-dots puzzle where the dots are connected only by a 177-mile subway line. Each clump feels unrelated to its counterparts, existing like its own little outpost, in a weird metropolis that spreads over 792 square miles. Conventional wisdom says Shenzhen sprang from a single fishing village with a population of 30,000. How and why did it spread, over the space of forty years, from this tiny nucleus into a bizarre and randomly-placed mushroom-crop of skyscrapers flung across an area that’s almost double the size of Los Angeles, with a GDP that in 2017 outstripped Hong Kong and Singapore?

The answer lies in debunking a creation myth that has been gleefully spread by everyone from the New York Times to the World Bank. Something from nothing is the classic Cinderella story and applying it to Shenzhen makes the emergence of this city almost miraculous. The truth however makes it much more interesting.

Hong Kong architect and academic Juan Du became intrigued with Shenzhen after she missed her flight out of the city. Wandering away from the affluent grounds of her hotel, she stumbled upon a village that was decidedly not affluent. The ramshackle buildings were no more than seven stories tall and children, accompanied by barking dogs, played noisily near long lines of vendors who were cooking over open flames. People sat on folding chairs, eating outdoors at a night market that was at least a century behind anything else Juan Du had seen in Shenzhen. 

When she began to investigate, she discovered that Shenzhen had over 300 of these villages spread across the city, all of them surrounded by skyscrapers. Between them they contained over 350,000 peasant houses that now offered affordable rentals to the city’s recently arrived labor force. How did these places come into being? 

The uncovered truth shatters the Shenzhen myth. In 1979 Bao’an County became the site of the city of Shenzhen. An area of 2020 square kilometers, with a population of 358,000, it contained over 2000 agrarian villages. Each of these provided a separate nucleus for urban development, which grew up around the farming communities, and each became known as an urban village. 

Even the crown jewel of Shenzhen, the glittering and wealthy area of Shennan Boulevard, is based upon humble origins. It originally was Country Road 107, built to connect the port to the market town that gave the city its name. Stripped of the mythical origin of a little fishing village, the legacy of Bao’an County is rich in regional history, with a longstanding economy built upon salt and oyster farms, as well as agriculture. What now appear to be random dots of modern development are actually based upon the villages that still prevail. Shenzhen’s “spatial development” has been shaped by “centuries-old agrarian spatial patterns,” which explains the confusing incoherence of it all.

But perhaps not for much longer--Shenzhen’s goal is to become a “comprehensive city,” with urban planning that will turn those unconnected dots into a full picture. To accomplish this, the urban villages are being subsumed into the whole, with Huanggang Village providing the desired prototype.

A community that had been in place since 1426, Huanggang was demolished and rebuilt as an urbanized historic village, touted as a “model village,” clean, modern, and sanitized beyond all recognition. It stands in brutal contrast to the village that Juan Du first encountered.

Baishizhou was notorious for being the “poorest, dirtiest, and biggest” of Shenzhen’s urban villages. Once five separate farm villages, it held approximately 200,000 people who lived in 2477 peasant houses. It was famous for having the lowest rent in the city and new arrivals flocked to it, attracted by housing that was cramped and uncomfortable. However, unlike the factory housing provided by employers like FoxConn, which was only a few kilometers away, the rooms in Baishizhou were unmonitored; they offered personal freedom.

Small businesses sprang up to cater to the needs of the new residents but gentrification was lurking on the edges. Surrounded by theme parks and luxurious hotels, Baishizhou became a prime target for the owners of art galleries, gourmet coffee shops, and craft breweries. When residents refused to make room for these new refinements, the city simply cut off their water and electricity. Now Baishizhou exists as an online video game created in the U.S. 

Shenzhen learned to become forceful in its relocation efforts after dealing with a villager who had owned both house and land rights for over forty years. She was the sole hold-out as her neighbors struck deals with the city.  For three years, as other houses were demolished and the skyscrapers drew near, her home stood alone in the midst of rubble, a “nail house” that remained hammered into place. She sold it at last for 12 million yuan and disappeared with her fortune. It was much cheaper to simply turn off the utilities.

But as the lights darken in the villages, they’re replaced with the blaze of 21st Century splendor. The new dream is to blend Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong into a single world-dazzling metropolis. Impossible? Tell that to Shenzhen.~Janet Brown

Animal's People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)

“I used to be human once. So I’m told. I don’t remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet just like a human being.”

Animal’s People is set against the backdrop of one of the world’s worst industrial accidents as a model that took place in Bhopal, India in 1984 and was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize. 

On the night of December 2 and 3, 1984 at the U.S. owned Union Carbide pesticide plant, over thirty tons of methyl isocyanate (MIC), a highly toxic gas used in the production of a pesticide called Sevin which is Union Carbide’s brand name for carbaryl, which spread over the town of Bhopal, immediately killing thousands of citizens and continues to haunt the populace today as the company was never forced to clean up their mess. 

The story is narrated by a nineteen year old Indian boy, only known as Animal, whose faithful companion is a dog named Jara and lives in the fictional city of Khaufpur. He was born a few days before that night “which no one in Khaufpur wants to remember, but nobody can forget.”

Animal is an orphan as the gas killed his parents. He was brought up in an orphanage run by a French nun known as Ma Franci. The nun used to be able to speak Hindi and English but after the incident, she has forgotten all languages except her own. 

Animal makes his living by doing all sorts of scams throughout the city. The factory gases have affected his body so he can only walk on all fours, as an Animal. He spots three college-aged girls and practices one of his routines by having Jara play dead while he goes on a spiel about suffering from starvation to which one of the girls does something he does not foresee. 

She asks, “Did you teach him?” Animal says that for five rupees he can get the dog to sing the national anthem. She counters with, “Is begging fun?” Animal replies, “Is it fun to be hungry? No, so then don’t mock me.” This is where he meets Nisha who changes his life. It is Nisha who teaches Animal how to read. He also learns to speak the language of Ma Francie. 

Animal becomes infatuated with Nisha but he feels a bit of jealousy when he’s introduced to Zafar, an activist who has been leading the fight against the Amrikan Kampani (American company) . At the same time, a young American woman named Dr. Elli appears in Khaufpur and announces that she is going to open a clinic and it will be free to anyone who wishes to come. 

After spending her own fortune and going through a lot of government red tape, the idealist Dr. Elli opens her clinic only to be puzzled why nobody shows up. Unfortunately, Zafar believes the clinic is another one of the Kampany’s plans to divert being held responsible for an incident that happened almost twenty years ago. Dr. Elli realizes that people want treatment but they all refuse to come to the clinic. She expresses her exasperation to Animal, “These people have nothing. Why do they turn down a genuine and good offer of help? I don’t get it.”

Animal says he understands because they’re his people - Animal’s people. The story explores government corruption and multinational corporations exploitation of labor and resources. It is a novel that sheds light on the injustices of the world and how it affects the life of the ordinary everyday citizens who have no money or power to fight back. In this day and age of for profit enterprises, it takes a book like this to point out that there are more important things than money. ~Ernie Hoyt