The Road to Sleeping Dragon by Michael Meyer (Bloomsbury Publishing)

What booksellers categorize as travel literature comes in two different sorts of books: the ones written by people on the move and the ones who go to another country and stay put. Within that second category are three different sorts of writers--the poetic, idyllic ones, the ones who become instant experts, and the ones who realize that their new home needs to be earned, paid for with mistakes and mishaps, many of them comic. 

Michael Meyer understands that from the outset when the Peace Corps sends him to teach at a small college in a Sichuan town for two years. Here he encounters students with English names that are rarely sported by native English speakers, girls named Rambo, Dinger, and Chinatown, boys who call themselves Carnegie and Wiseman. Since Meyer has been given the Chinese name of Heroic Easten Peach Blossom, he’s in no position to laugh. He knows from experience that this sort of mirth stings. While on an ill-fated solo bus ride that concludes his two-month training period, one that ends in bloodshed and a first-hand look at rural Chinese police crime deterrance, he learns to steel himself for the merriment that comes from bearing a name more commonly given to girls.

Attacked by food poisoning, he goes to a doctor who hands him a prescription for watermelon and Pepsi. A winter cold is medicated with Coca-Cola boiled with sliced fresh ginger. It takes three weeks for letters to reach the U.S. and in the pre-internet days of 1995, posted correspondence is an essential lifeline. His advisor tells him to “teach the Beatles,” and later in his academic career he’s given a course simply called Movies.

“The Peace Corps attracts curious people who are comfortable being alone--one reason, perhaps it had incubated so many writers, “ Meyer speculates. He finds that what Aldous Huxley called “the reducing valve” that modulates and pigeonholes sensory impressions doesn’t operate in his corner of Sichuan, where everything is fresh and new, never experienced before. “I’m hyperaware,” he writes to his mother, “but also exhausted.”

At the end of his two-year stint, he’s grown accustomed to the mild electric shocks provided by his morning shower, has become a local basketball star, and is no longer greeted by passersby with faintly pejorative shouts of “Laowai.” Reluctant to leave China, he applies for a job in a Beijing international school, where his Sichuan dialect and his habit of an afternoon break for three hours immediately mark him as a country bumpkin. 

No longer restricted by the Peace Corps’ ban on dating local girls, Meyer falls in love with a co-worker. Lily is smart, ambitious, and fiercely Chinese. When Meyer greets her dream of studying in the West by questioning whether she would ever want to return home, she almost breaks up with him. Instead when the school’s winter break arrives, she invites him to spend Christmas at her family’s home in Manchuria. Meyer walks into the house and is greeted with a fully-trimmed Christmas tree, wrapped presents for him resting beneath it. “You are home, “ his future father-in-law tells him.

Lily’s acceptance at San Francisco State begins the couple’s long period of separation. Meyer becomes a travel journalist and the author of The Last Days of Old Beijing, his account of living and teaching in an old  Beijing neighborhood with the lack of of personal privacy that comes from using a communal toilet. When the Olympics are scheduled to happen in Beijing, he’s asked by a local police officer to teach him “English vulgarities so I’ll know when a foreigner is cursing me.” Official police courses teach dialogues like “Dissuading Foreigners from Excessive Drinking” along with the indispensable phrase “Don’t pretend to be innocent.”

Even though his Chinese work permit proclaims that he’s a “foreign expert,” Meyer never lapses into the role of an omniscient Old China Hand. He keeps his sense of wonder and mercifully never loses his sense of humor. His love for his other home in the world is contagious; this book should be required reading for every foreigner who plans to visit, work, or live in China.~Janet Brown

The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years by Chingiz Aitmatov (Indiana University Press)

Chingiz Aitmotov’s debut novel, The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years was originally published in an 1980 issue of Novy Mir, a Russian literary magazine. It was subsequently published in book form in 1981 with the title The Railway Siding Burannyi. This English language edition was published by Indiana University Press in 1988

The story is set in the early years of the Cold War at a remote railway station called Boranly-Burannyi in Soviet-era Kazakhstan. “On either side of the railway lines lay the great wide spaces of the desert - Sary-Ozeki, the Middle lands of the yellow steppes.”

“In these parts any distance was measured in relation to the railway, as if from the Greenwich Meridian”. 

“Trains in these parts went from East to West, and from West to East…”

Only two families have actually settled in this lonely place. The main character Burrannyi Yedigei, “so-called because he had worked at the Boranly-Burannyi junction ever since he returned from the war” and his wife Ukubala and their long-time friend Kazangap.

On a cold, winter night, Ukubala has come to inform her husband that their friend Kazangap has died. Although Kazakhstan is a part of the communist Soviet Union, most of the people who live in the region are Muslims. Yedigei makes it his responsibility to pray over the body and to inform Kazangap’s son about his father’s death. He also needs to inform his two daughters and their husbands to come to Boranly-Burannyi as well. The daughters may not be blood relatives of Kazangap, but they were born in Boranly-Burannyi and knew Kazangap well and cherished him. 

The rest of the story takes place in a single day as Yedigei makes arrangements to have his friend Kazangap buried at the cemetery of Ana-Beiit which is located about thirty-kilometers away from the Boranly-Burannyi junction. Yedigei is the only one of the current residents at the railway station that knows how to get there although everybody has heard about the cemetery as there were many legends surrounding the place and the person it was named after. 

Yedigei leads the way to the cemetery sitting astride his camel, Karanar, that Kazangap had given to him as a gift many years ago. Kazangap’s son Sabitzhan and his sister Aizada, along with her alcoholic husband have also come to Boranly-Burannyi to make the trip to the Ana-Beiit cemetery. 

As the entourage makes their way to the cemetery, Yedigei reminisces about his early life before the war when he lived as a fisherman along the Aral Sea. He talks about his own history and the history of his people, mostly to himself, always thinking about Kazangap, who was the person to convince him to move to Boranly-Burannyi. 

Aitmatov includes a subplot about two cosmonauts, one Soviet and one American who have made contact with intelligent extraterrestrial beings and have gone to visit them on their home planet of Lesnaya Grud without informing their superiors. After Ukubala informs Yedigei about the death of his friend, Yedigei witnesses a rocket launching into the air. Although rocket launches are infrequent they are usually announced beforehand and a great celebration is held. This launch was unannounced. At the same time, a rocket from the desert of Nevada has also taken off to meet with its Soviet partner at the Soviet-American space station called Parity. 

The two concurrent stories deal with the questions of tradition and progress. The central character recalls legends from the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan, published at a time when the nation was still a part of the Soviet Union and challenges the status quo as the hero is an ordinary worker who wants to bury his friend in the Muslim tradition of the Kazakhs.

The subplot of making contact with an intelligent alien species and how the governments of the U.S. and Soviet handle the situation leads one to believe that the two countries aren’t working in the name of progress but are focused on thinking of ways to keep themselves in power. It’s a reminder that even governments are afraid of what they don’t understand.

The book is a great introduction to the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan. The land may be barren but the book brings to life the culture and traditions of a country most people could not find on a map. ~Ernie Hoyt

Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala (Knopf)

On the day after Christmas, 2004, Sonali Deraniyagala is chatting with her friend at a Sri Lanka beach resort. Her husband is in the bathroom and her two sons are absorbed by their Christmas presents. Suddenly her friend looks out at the sea and says. “Oh my god. The sea’s coming in.” The two women watch as waves grow larger and come closer. They call to their families and then they all run.

A jeep moves by, stops, and picks them up but the water finds them, filling the interior of the vehicle until it reaches their chests. The jeep turns over. 

Sonali is alone, spinning, within the wave, feeling crushing pain, her chest hurting as if it’s “being pummeled by a great stone.” Time moves slowly enough that she pinches herself on the leg to wake herself up, hoping that she’s dreaming. Her head finally moves above the water and she begins to float, a screaming boy beside her. She looks to see if he’s her child. He’s a stranger and she puts him out of her mind. When she sees a tree branch above her, she grabs it and her feet touch solid ground in “an immense bogland,..a knocked-down world.”

She wonders if it was the “end of time,” which it is, for her. From the beginning she knows her husband and children are dead. She berates herself for not warning her parents before she and her husband ran away to save their sons. She feels disconnected from everyone she sees, from other survivors at a hospital to her brother andf his family when she returns to Columbo. She wants to die and knows that as soon as she has the strength, she will kill herself.

Her relatives stick by her side. Friends come from her home in England. She lives in agony, wondering why she and her husband had insisted that their children have two homes in the world, England and Sri Lanka. This now gives her two countries where she encounters all that they longer share. 

When her brother empties the home of their parents and rents it to a Dutch family a year after the wave, Sonali begins to haunt it. She pounds on its gates every night,, telephones the tenants at two in the morning, rings their doorbell, leaves and then comes back to do it again. Without peace herself, she refuses to give the right of living in peace to these strangers who have invaded her past.

When she returns to England, the life she used to have with the dead people she loves still fills the house they lived in. Ordinary objects pierce her wherever she looks and when her academic career as an economist offers her the chance to live in New York, she grabs it with the same savage desperation she had used to clutch the tree branch while engulfed in the wave.

It’s not until she returns to the Sri Lankan beach where she and her family were last together that she can look at the past without being stabbed in the heart. The eagles that her oldest son loved to watch are still there. When she ventures out onto the sea on a whale-watching expedition, the blue whales that fascinated her son come to the boat and Sonali sees “burst after burst of glowing blue,” the immensity of a tail breaking through the water. One of the whales comes close enough that she can hear it breathe; she believes it releases “a doleful sigh.” 

Her memories no longer cut through her with jagged edges. “I can only recover myself when I keep them near,” Sonali realizes. With deep generosity and great love, she has turned her vanished life into art and her pain into a terrible and blinding knowledge that all of us are afraid of, that all of us, she says, would be able to survive.~Janet Brown

The People's Republic of Desire by Annie Wang (Harper)

The People’s Republic of Desire is Annie Wang’s version of “Sex and the City”, replacing New York City with contemporary and urban Beijing, China and focuses on three upwardly mobile women - Niuniu, Lulu, and Beibei. The story is narrated by Niuniu as she and her friends discuss all sorts of topic that used to be taboo in Chinese society such as sex, divorce, and watching pornography. 

Niuniu is American by birth but returned to China when she was five years old as the Chinese government “called on ‘patriotic overseas Chinese’ to return to their homeland to build ‘a modern, strong China’”. Her parents emigrated to the United States in the mid-seventies. Her mother, Wei Mei, was the daughter of revolutionary opera performers. She has been married three times and currently socializes with Beijing’s ex-patriot circle. Her father, Chen Siyuan, was an orphan from Taiwan. He is in his second marriage, his current wife being his former secretary and is only eight years older than Niuniu. They are about to have a baby. 

Lulu and Beibei are Niuniu’s childhood friends. They met when they were students at Beijing’s Jingshan School. Beibei is the oldest of the three, seven years older than Niuniu. Lulu is four years older. The school included grades one through twelve all on the same grounds and the three were fighting with some boys over the use of a ping-pong table. Beibei was in high school, Lulu, a junior high student, while Niuniu was still in elementary school. However, Niuniu liked hanging out with older kids. The three of them became inseparable friends. 

Niuniu was educated in the U.S. and received her B.A. in journalism from the University of Missouri at Columbia and got her M.A. in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley. She is now in her twenties and is currently working as a reporter for the World News Agency in Beijing. She is considered one of the members of the xin xin renlei who are considered the “new” new generation. They are the Chinese generation Xers and Yers who enjoy hanging out at bars, have multiple sex partners, and get plenty of use out of the Internet. As a returnee, Niuniu says she’s sometimes called a fake. The local Chinese call her a jia yangguizi - a “fake foreign devil”.

Lulu is the executive editor of a fashion magazine called Women’s Friends. Although she was offered high paying jobs after graduating from Beijing University she chose to be an editorial assistant at a fashion magazine. Fashion magazines were still new to Chinese society, “that few people could afford to buy them and the pay for working there was low.” Now, she is the number two person at the magazine. She “enjoys wearing expensive high fashion numbers from designers like Gucci and Versace.” Lulu is also in love with an artist named Ximu who has brought her nothing but bad luck. 

Beibei is the president of a successful production company. She has been married for seven years and has had a number of lovers. Her current boy-toy is called Iron Egg. She is the daughter of a Chinese general and doesn’t hesitate to use your connections for personal gain. Beibei hangs out with Niuniu and Lulu almost everyday as if she were still single.

Wang entertains the readers with the exploits of the three women and others as they try to find love and happiness on their own terms, however, it is mostly about Niuniu finding herself and discovering the strength to do what she needs to do. The story reads more like a continuous episode of “Friends” with elements of “Sex in the City” and “The Joy Luck Club” featuring strong women characters who are not afraid to speak their minds. ~Ernie Hoyt

Welcome to the Bangkok Slaughterhouse by Father Joseph Maier (Periplus Editions)

There are few heroes, let alone saints, among Catholic priests nowadays, but Father Joe Maier qualifies as both, although he would vehemently deny that. For over fifty years, he has lived and worked in Bangkok’s most notorious slum, one where other foreigners fear to tread. 

Now in his 80’s, Father Joe entered a seminary when he was a high school freshman and was sent to Thailand in 1967 by his order soon after he was ordained at the age of 28. A young rebel who protested the Vietnam War, this Grateful Dead fan was given one of the “most remote and undesirable assignments,” as his friend Jerry Hopkins says in the book’s introduction. He ended up in a hovel surrounded by a community of hovels, in the part of Bangkok where livestock are slaughtered by residents who are not prohibited from this work by Buddhism. Many of them are Catholic, so Father Joe wasn’t there to proselytize and win converts. His job was to take care of people whose religious beliefs mirrored his own.

In 1971, he guided Mother Theresa through his parish of Klong Toey. She told him “to stay in the slums, where the need was great.” He’s still there.

Every month or so, Father Joe wrote stories about his community for the Bangkok Post, which were collected and published in this book. They are heart-wrenching without being maudlin. Father Joe lives among people who have no time for sentimentality and little time for grief. He tells about them with a straight-to-the-chin approach, laced with a degree of humor and a lot of love, presenting them as heroes, even when they fail.

First he shows the children: nine-year-old Note who was born with AIDS and whose best friend is Galong, a thirty-five-year-old man who was born with Downs Syndrome and is mentally younger than the boy who takes good care of  him; Miss Naree, who at the age of eight, and with very little money in her hand,  took her friends on an unsanctioned outing from Father Joe’s Mercy Center for a visit to the zoo on the other side of the city; twelve-year-old Pim who was arrested as a drug courier, whose life was threatened by the man she testified against, and who was released into the care of Father Joe’s staff of nuns and volunteers.

The Mercy Center is a refuge, a place to live for mothers and children with AIDS, where adults with AIDS who can no longer take care of themselves are cared for, where 250 children who have no other place to live are given a safe home. It houses a preschool with over 500 students, a “successful slum women’scredit union”, a jobs program for disabled Khlong Toey residents, an AIDS hospice--and a house for Father Joe. A stipulation that came with a huge donation said the funds would be given only if he moved out of his tin-roofed shack in the middle of the slum, for health reasons. 

Father Joe ends with a stark view of his Slaughterhouse community. Khlong Toey is a village where nobody owns the land they live on, where a fire in one house can destroy thirty others in a few minutes, where truck drivers deliver livestock and buy drugs, where selling amphetamines for high-level dealers is the easiest way to keep a family afloat. He singles out heroes who have defied the odds: Miss Froggy who grew up in the Slaughtehouse and stayed on as a teacher and community activist, Miss Kanok-tip who heads a group of other disabled women in the Five Kiosk Workforce, selling snacks and soft drinks from streetside stalls, running their own businesses; Samlee whose uncle kept her in school up through high school graduation even though the family lived under a bridge and who now teaches kindergarten, making sure her own children have an education. He never mentions his own efforts.

It’s left to his friend Jerry Hopkins to tell us who Father Joe really is—a man who enjoys a cold Heinekken, who hasn’t “cut the four-letter words from his conversational vocabulary,” who lived in a squatter’s shack for twenty years as he “focused on redemption, the act of being set free, or saved” in this life, this world, not the next. Still a maverick, he told CNN “Buddhists and Muslims taught me how to be a Christian.” When guiding visitors through the Slaughterhouse, he laughs as he says of himself and of “those for whom his dreams were built,” “We’re mad. Barking mad.” But his is divine madness, in the truest sense.~Janet Brown

* * * * *

All proceeds from the sale of this book go to the Human Development Foundation, a non-denominational, community-based organization that gives aid to over thirty slum communities in Bangkok.

www.MercyCentre.org

BPO-Sutra : True Stories from India's BPO & Call Centres edited by Sudhindra Mokhasi (Rupa & Co.)

BPO-Sutra is a book best described by its sub-title, “True stories from India’s BPO & Call Centres”. The book is a compilation of stories told by ordinary people who work in the BPO and call center industry. Editor Sudhindra Mokhasi highly recommends reading the glossary first to acquaint the reader with all the jargon associated with BPOs. What’s a BPO? BPO stands for Business Process Outsourcing. It is a method of subcontracting various business-related operations such as tech support and payroll to third-party vendors. 

Aside from BPO, in order to truly appreciate the stories, the reader should familiarize themselves with the meanings of the acronyms ISP, AHT, COPC certified, SME, NCNS as well as some other terms used in the industry such as cold calling, call escalation, call monitoring, captive center, offshoring, etc. 

The meanings of the acronyms are as follows: ISP (Internet Service Provider), AHT (Average Handling Time), COPC certified (Customer Operations Performance Center) which is an organization the evaluates and certifies BPO companies that meet and maintain certain standards), SME (Subject Matter Expert), NCNS (No Call No Show) - a term used for employees who don’t call or show up for work. 

Cold calling refers to the practice of making random calls to people to promote a product or service. Perhaps one of the most hated aspects of the business as cold calling refers to telemarketers. 

Call escalation is when the call exceeds the amount of time allotted to the agent to deal with the customer to resolve issues. If the call goes beyond the allotted time, the call is then transferred to a supervisor or manager. 

Call monitoring is a practice where calls made or received by agents are monitored by quality analysts and managers to assess the quality of their call agents. 

A captive center is not a prison, it is a company-owned offshore operation where the work is also done offshore by the people hired by the company. The practice of offshoring is when one country has their work done in another country where labor costs are usually cheaper, saving the parent company hundreds, thousands or millions of dollars. 

In the early years of the 2000s, many U.S. companies were offshoring to India. Major corporations such as General Electric and British Airways proved that offshoring office work to India was a viable option. “More importantly, the world had suddenly discovered that there were millions of English speaking smart Indians. It couldn’t have been a better time.”

The stories are separated into six self-explanatory categories related to BPO life - Calls, Work, Travel, Home, Scams, and Parties and Weekends. The book invites the reader to “join us as we party One Night in Every Call Center.”

It’s almost a given that most Americans hate telemarketers and do not like dealing with call centers, however, this book gives the reader an insight to how the call centers work and by whom they are run. It is a highly informative introduction to the common practice of Business Process Outsourcing. 

One of earliest BPOs to be established were the call centers and this book gives the reader an indepth look as to what goes on inside such a place. The editor reiterates how call centers are numbers obsessed. “Everything in operations is converted to a metric, metric and monitored. Take Average Holding Time (AHT) for example. AHT is used as a measure for effectiveness of an agent. Tough luck if you get a dim customer.”

The stories range from the hilarious to the absurd. There are some pieces that are moving and some pieces that will just make you shake your head. You will laugh, you will cry and you definitely will not be bored. Remember, the next time you receive a call from a telemarketer saying his name is Sean, chances are he’s an Indian speaking with an American accent to try to sell you products or services for a multi-national corporation. ~Ernie Hoyt

City Gate, Open Up by Bei Dao, translated by Jeffrey Yang (New Directions Books)

Few books have surprised me as much as Bei Dao’s memoir of growing up in Beijing in the 1950’ s and 60’s. I picked it up certain that I was going to be faced with another “misery memoir,” tales of cruelty and deprivation during China’s Great Step Forward and Cultural Revolution. Instead this book recreates Beijing as it once was, an account steeped in the world of the senses and told through the point of a view of a child. 

When he returns after a thirteen-year absence in 2001, as his plane prepares to land in the city that had been his home, he’s dazzled by the light that sprawls below him, “like a huge, glittering soccer stadium.” In the houses of his childhood, there was no lighting stronger than 14 watts and some bicyclists when traveling at night lit their way by carrying paper lanterns. The darkness was a time for playing hide-and-seek, telling stories, acknowledging the presence of ghosts. The new glare of fluorescent light immediately makes him “a foreigner in my own hometown.” 

His hometown from the past is rebuilt with the precision and beauty of a poet, which is what Zhao Zhenkai has become famous for, writing volumes of poetry under the pen name Bei Dao. History is a dim background to the sense memories that Zhao uses to reconstruct his neighborhood in Beijing, a place filled with the smell of coal smoke and dust. The seasons are marked by other odors: winter is characterized by the smell of white cabbage, which every family buys in amounts of almost four hundred pounds, peeled, sun-dried, and stacked as a bulwark against months of cold and hunger.  Spring is announced by the blossoms of apricot, pear, and peach trees, their fragrance “so intense it made people dizzy, lulling them to sleep.” Summer has the faint perfume of the yellow flowers of pagoda trees followed by autumn’s smell of chalk dust and fallen leaves with their “bitter aroma of strong tea.”

His neighborhood rings with village noises: the crowing of a neighbor’s rooster,  the cries of  street vendors, the sounds of wagon wheels and horses’ hooves on the pavement, the “ruckus” of cicadas, those “pure noisemakers.” One night another boy takes Zhao to a a dark street where he hears the “disordered cilp-clop”  of a herd of donkeys that will soon be food for the carnivores in the zoo.

Food is a recurring theme that takes on greater strength with each chapter. Childhood treats of frozen icepops and White Rabbit candy with its edible rice-paper wrappers, along with the horror of cod liver oil that’s doled out every morning, give way to a savage hunger. Discarded vegetable trimmings that Zhou gathers to feed his pet rabbits are confiscated by his mother and turned into the family’s supper. Later, before the rabbits die of starvation, his father kills them to provide a feast that Zhao and his siblings tearfully refuse to eat. Boys dive for freshwater clams in a city lake to augment the cabbage and yam diet that has made the neighborhood swell with dropsy.

Childhood games of shooting marbles, rolling hoops, and spinning tops become subsumed in the excitement of lighting firecrackers that turn into battles  with gangs of boys besieging each other, “as if we were preparing for a war.” “The day the Great Cultural Revolution Broke out, I remembered the pungent smell of my first firecracker.”

And when life changes forever on June 1, 1966, “countless boys and girls served as the source of that energy.” At first the Cultural Revolution feels like a game that frees students from facing examinations. “All classes were dismissed, the term over; I cheered with relief, flitting about like a joyful sparrow,” Even when he and his family take his parents’ cache of banned books from the attic and burn what Zhao had regarded as his treasure, he feels “a stealthy thread of delight.” 

“I became king of the children,” and Zhao leads his neighborhood gang to the home of a man rumored to have once fought with the Kuomintang. Gleefully they  shave his head and imprison him in a basement for days. “After that, bumping into him on the street was like meeting a ghost.”

What had been a childhood that echoed Dylan Thomas’s memories of Christmas in Wales is warped into Golding’s Lord of the Flies. “His bold vision,” Zhao says, had been a ruthless reality for us.” “The stench of blood spread across Beijing” and violence shattered the city that had been a childhood idyll. 

But in 2010, I experienced three seasons in the same area that Zhao grew up in. In the evening, little stone houses on narrow streets gleamed with dim squares of light, trees furled in emerald canopies along the lake where he used to play, old men in an outdoor market sold bamboo cages that held crickets, on weekends women held bouquets of balloons for sale. And everywhere there was food in glorious abundance: piles of fresh pineapple, stalls where women made pancakes to order, bakeries filled with cakes and cookies, and the omnipresent smell of grilled lamb skewers. Everywhere I went I saw children, eating.

What was lost? What’s been gained? Who can measure this? But thanks to Bei Dao/Zhao Zhenkai, we can remember a world we’ll never know..~Janet Brown 

Soldiers in Hiding by Richard Wiley (Picador)

Soldiers in Hiding is narrated by Teddy Maki, a Japanese-American, who currently lives in Japan. Maki is the host of his own television program titled Original Amateur Hour. When Teddy sees a news item about a lost Japanese soldier coming back to Japan, he begins to relate how he and his friend Jimmy Yamamoto ended up in Japan in the first place.. 

Teddy Maki and his close friend Jimmy Yamamoto started a band after high school and they were quite successful. Jimmy managed to get an agent to book shows in Japan. Their Japanese agent called himself Ike and Jimmy and Teddy were his only clients but Ike managed to get the two many gigs and the two arrived in Japan in the winter of 1941. Ike also encouraged Jimmy to pursue his sister Kazuko in a romantic way. 

Jimmy and Kazuko got married at the end of November after a very short courtship. A week after the wedding Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Although Teddy could speak Japanese, he was not proficient at reading. He could read a little and made out the words for America, recognized the face of Admiral Yamamoto and saw the kanji character for war.

Teddy and Jimmy are stuck in Japan. They have no way of going home and no one can guarantee their safety in Japan. It was Kazuko’s words that made the two realize the seriousness of the situation. She says, “That’s what you’ll have to do. Enlist. You are Japanese before you are American. Enlist and fight!” What can the two Americans do but enlist in the Japanese Imperial Army and fight against their own country.

As Teddy and Jimmy can speak English fluently, they are attached to detail to guard and question American POWs. Their commanding officer is Major Nakamura. There was one P.O.W. who didn’t cringe under Nakamura’s gaze. This infuriated the Major who ordered his men to tie the P.O.W. to a post in the middle of the camp. When Major Nakamura discovers that Jimmy had been giving the soldier chocolate, he orders Jimmy to shoot the man in front of all of the other prisoners. 

Jimmy got as far as pointing his rifle to the man’s head but then put his gun down and said in English, “No.” This is the last straw for Major Nakamura who takes out his pistol and shoots Jimmy Yamamoto point blank in the head, killing him instantly. The Major then orders Teddy to kill the man, he says “Save yourself. Shoot him.” Looking down at Jimmy’s dead body, Teddy feels he has no choice but to follow the Major’s orders. 

The war ends and years pass. One day, there’s a breaking news story on television. A former Japanese soldier, Ike, was found and is coming home to Japan. Welcoming Ike back to Japan is another soldier from Teddy’s past - Major Nakamura! This sets a fire in Teddy’s mind as he wants to ask the Major directly, why did he kill Jimmy Yamamoto, and he wants to interview the Major on his popular television program. 

Was Major Nakamura justified in executing Jimmy Yamamoto? Would Teddy Maki have suffered the same fate as Jimmy if he did not shoot the POW? And does Major Nakamura feel any remorse about what he did during the war? This is an intense story about ethics and where one’s loyalty lies. It is also about survival during times of war and its immediate aftermath once it ends. 

As the old adage goes, “In war, no one wins!” ~Ernie Hoyt

The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad (Virago)

Asne Seierstad is a Norwegian journalist. In the fall of 2003, she spent three months in Afghanistan reporting for many Scandinavian newspapers. She first met Sultan Khan in November of that year. Sultan Khan (not his real name) is the owner of a bookstore in the Afghan capital of Kabul. He is The Bookseller of Kabul.

Seierstad had spent six weeks with the Northern Alliance “in the desert by the Tajikistani border, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, in the Panshir Valley, and on the steppes north of Kabul”. She was following their offensive against the Taliban. She “slept on stone floor, in mud huts, and at the front, travelled on the back of lorries, in military vehicles, on horseback and on foot.” After the fall of the Taliban, she went to Kabul with the Northern Alliance where she discovered a small bookstore. 

Seierstad became a regular visitor to the bookshop and enjoyed browsing for books and talking to the proprietor, an Afghan man who says he felt let down by his country time and again. She listened to him talk about running his bookshop before, during and after the reign of the Taliban. “First the Communists burnt my books, then the Mujahadeen looted and pillaged, finally the Taliban burnt them all over again.”

Talking with Sultan Khan gives Seierstad the idea of how interesting it would be to write about his family. She makes the proposal and at the beginning of February, she spends four months living with the family. As a woman, she was able to get close to the female members of the family and as a Westerner she was able to move freely amongst the men and women of the family. 

Seierstad says, “If I were to live in a typical Afghan family it would have been with a family in the countryside, a large family where no one could read or write, and every day was a battle for survival.”  

Seierstad reminds the reader that she didn’t pick this family to represent the average Afghani household. It is about one Afghan family, one that would be considered middle-class by Western standards as many of the children were educated, most could read and write and they always had enough money so didn’t face the fear of starving. She chose them because they inspired her. 

After the publication of the book, Suraia Rais, the second wife of Shah Muhammad Rais,the real-life Sultan Khan, sued Seierstad for defamation of character. At first, the courts rule in favor of Rais but Seierstad appealed the ruling and after an eight year legal battle, the Norwegian Supreme Court overturned the lower court's ruling citing “the family was well aware of the nature of the book project” adding that Seierstad was found “not to have acted negligently, and the content of the book was essentially deemed true.” 

It appears the family were unhappy with the way they were portrayed. Sultan Khan was portrayed as a dictatorial patriarch whose word is law and his second wife probably didn’t enjoy being described as spoiled and entitled. As a journalist, Seierstad manages to be objective about her subjects, she says “the manner in which they were portrayed was not “ideal” but she represented the family in a “respectful” way. 

She praises Rais for selling his books when it was dangerous to do so and believes he is an Afghan hero but says he is also an Afghan patriarch and one of the things that continued to irritate her was “the manner in which men treated women. The belief in man’s superiority was so ingrained that it was seldom questioned.” 

I also believe that Sultan Khan, Shah Muhammad Rais is a hero. As someone who promotes reading and education, he and his customers will be the future of Afghanistan. I only hope that peace and stability will one day come to their country. ~Ernie Hoyt