Hong Kong Holiday by Emily Hahn (Doubleday & Company, out of print)

Emily Hahn was an American writer who came to live in Shanghai in 1935.  She remained there until 1941, leaving it for Hong Kong only after she fell in love with Charles Boxer, a British Army officer. During her two years in the Crown Colony, Hahn chronicled her stay in articles for the New Yorker, which were published as the essay collection, Hong Kong Holiday.

The title is obviously a sardonic choice. What begins as a respite from the war in China takes a grim turn after the first four essays. Hahn came to Hong Kong after spending time in the “beleagured” capital of Chungking; her opening essays describe the bliss of living without air raid sirens, the pleasure of living on the Peak with her gibbons, enjoying cocktails, gossip, and the soothing ministrations of a good hairdresser. Then the Japanese bombers come to town, Boxer is wounded in a fight against the invading Imperial Army, and Hahn, who recently had given birth, begins a long battle for survival in a fallen city.

With Boxer in a prison camp, Hahn is focused upon keeping herself and her baby out of an internment center and with keeping everyone in her extended family fed as well as possible. Hong Kong becomes unnaturally silent; its people have “the drawn, false anxiety of a starving man’s face.” “I lost the energy for pity,” Hahn says, and she is ruthless in her drive to safeguard the people she loves.

But  it’s impossible for her to lose the energy for  writing. The New Yorker had hired her to be their China correspondent in 1935 and Hahn can’t afford the luxury of writer’s block. She chronicles her Hong Kong years with an offhand touch that almost disguises the hunger, the extreme cold, the fear, and the rage. 

A Eurasian friend whose husband is missing in battle says, “The Eurasian boys were the ones who fought best. Almost all of the good ones were killed...I ask myself what my husband died for.” Another tells what happened after Japanese soldiers took over the hospital where she worked. “I got away from them in the dark and hid under a cot. The other girls had to go with them.” She tells the story over and over until Hahn realizes the truth and tells her “If a thing isn’t in your mind, don’t you see, it never happened.”

With a mixture of understanding and deep contempt, Hahn tells stories of the Hong Kong collaborators. She herself benefits from teaching English to members of the Kempeitai, whom she terms the Japanese Gestapo, and those students supply her with necessities of life: bags of rice, flour, wheat. When her daughter reaches her first birthday, a Japanese soldier brings a tin filled with sugar for Carola’s birthday cake.

Hahn shows how war creeps in almost imperceptibly before it explosively announces its arrival, illustrates how determination and ingenuity are more valuable than gold in an occupied city, and reveals the core of spun steel that still exists within Hong Kong’s glittering and privileged exterior. Hong Kong Holiday, 73 years after it was first published, is a testament to the strength of the Region and an assertion of its ability to remain alive. ~Janet Brown

You Gotta Have Wa by Robert Whiting (Vintage)

I will be the first to admit that I have absolutely no interest in baseball. However, my older brother loved the sport and often forced me to play. This would have been in my elementary years when we lived on a military base in Japan. But I did enjoy watching the sport back then with my brother and we would often root for the home team, the Yomiuri Giants. One of my fondest memories was seeing an actual game between the Yomiuri Giants and the Hanshin Tigers at Korakuen Stadium.

As an adult, I moved back to Japan and saw how baseball is still popular as ever, maybe even more popular than the traditional Japanese sport of sumo. That is when I came upon Robert Whiting’s book which renewed my interest in finding out more about how the game became so popular in Japan. 

Robert Whiting writes an interesting story about the history of baseball in Japan. How Japan took an American sport and made it into their own national pastime. In order to really enjoy this book, you need to understand what wa is. To put it simply, wa is a Japanese word that means unity or harmony. It’s a concept whereby a team or group of people act as a whole and where individualism is frowned upon.

This book was first published in 1988, more than thirty years ago but is still relevant today. It is not so much about baseball as it is about Japanese culture as seen through the sport. A culture that is very resistant to change. The concept of wa isn’t limited to professional baseball players but to high school and university players as well and in most businesses too.

This is what Reggie Smith, a former Major League Baseball player had to say about playing for the Yomiuri Giants in Japan for two seasons, “This isn’t baseball….it only looks like it.” Those sentiments were shared by other American players and even some Japanese players as well. 

Suishu Tobita, considered to be the “god of baseball” said,  “Student baseball must be the baseball of self-discipline. It must be much more than a hobby. In many cases, it must be a baseball of pain and baseball practice of savage treatment.”  

From this American’s perspective, their training seems to be very intense verging on abusive. Choji Murata, who played for the Tokyo Lotte Orions, which changed their name to the Chiba Lotte Marines followed the strict regimen and believes that “pitchers should pitch until their arms fall off”. He threw over a hundred pitches during practice and even more during a game. He then continued to pitch with a torn ligament in his elbow for a year and a half. I don’t know if that’s dedication. It seems more like he was brainwashed into believing it was the right thing to do, 

I think Japan has been making progress though. I recently read a news piece about a high school baseball manager who benched his star pitcher, Roki Sasaki,  for the final in a tournament game because the player had threw 129 pitches the day before. The team would lose ending their chances of going to the prestigious Koshien tournament which is the World Series of Japanese High School Baseball. The manager was criticized by many for thinking about the pitcher’s health instead of focusing on winning. Current Major League Baseball player Yu Darvish of the Texas Rangers praised the manager’s decision saying, “In my opinion, those people saying things like why he (Sasaki) didn’t pitch are not giving a single thought to the kids.” 

Even if you are not a fan of baseball, Whiting will make you interested. You will be fascinated by the history of Japanese baseball and of the cultural comparisons between Japan and the U.S. The book has made me appreciate Japanese baseball more but not enough for me to become an actual fan of the sport. ~Ernie Hoyt

Beijing Payback by Daniel Nieh (HarperCollins)

Victor Li is a typical American twenty-two-year-old, more interested in what he can do on a basketball court than in a college classroom; he smokes weed once in a while, and was just busted for a DUI. But unlike any of his buddies, Victor is trying to cope with his father’s recent murder. Vincent Li died from  “two precise stabs in the chest and a clean slash across,” leaving his son a peculiar legacy: an attache case filled with stacks of cash, a Walther PPQ, and a Chinese passport bearing Victor’s name. 

Then a stranger from China shows up, revealing the business Victor’s father was enmeshed in before he emigrated to the States, in conjunction with three men who remained in China, and claiming Vincent Li’s murder resulted from a disagreement among partners. The stranger knows; Sun worked for Victor’s father since childhood in “China America trade,” a smuggling business that became so murky that it led to murder. And, as both Sun and a letter written to Victor by his father make clear, this murder leads to a clear-cut need for revenge against the partners who arranged the death.

Suddenly Victor is on a China-bound plane with a newly acquired passport, a PPQ, a hefty pile of cash, and Sun.  In Beijing Sun leads Victor to the luxurious underground bunker that belongs to the one partner who can be trusted, a nightclub that’s a Chinese version of Star Wars’ Cantina Bar, an upscale coffee shop “filled with solo expats and their MacBook Airs.”  Within this bizarre and twisted labrynth Victor encounters a mosaic of separate puzzle pieces: a gorgeous woman who uses her body as a trap, a French journalist who willingly sacrifices physical harm for career success, and a bag of ketamine lying near a corpse who has a long incision running down the side of his stomach.

In a stunning first novel, Daniel Nieh takes the format of a conventional crime thriller, turns it inside out, and slowly divulges its intricacies and its plot twists bit by bit. His richness of detail threatens to swamp his narrative but Nieh is always in control, ending an impenetrable puzzle with a surprise that’s impossible to anticipate, yet makes perfect sense. Beginning as a quick and forgettable beach read, Beijing Payback becomes the story of a rite of passage, as Victor Li moves from a bright California boyhood into Beijing’s underworld. Wading through crime, blood, and death, he discovers who his father really was and what his own future may hold.

And yet not all is gloom and slaughter--the book is lightened with the sardonic humor of Victor’s college friends and his older sister, given depth with its precise and vivid descriptions of the American Dream and the Chinese Miracle. Best of all, its open-ended conclusion leaves room for at least one more exploration of Victor’s odyssey into adulthood, showing why he’s on that bus, heading north. 

Although it’s only a possibility that readers haven’t seen the last of Victor Li,  it’s a certainty that Daniel Nieh will come up with another smart and riveting novel. The only flaw is it can’t come soon enough. ~Janet Brown