Catfish and Mandala by Andrew X. Pham (Picador)

Back in the 13th century, a Chinese diplomat named Chou Ta-Kuan may have been the first travel writer to voice the phenomenon that the 20th century called culture shock. Brought up to believe his country was the measure of all things, he was unsettled by the glory and splendor of the Khmer empire’s capital, Angkor Wat. Like many travelers who ventured into unknown worlds long after his death, Chou offset his rumpled world view with scathing derision of habits that differed from his own. This is a palliative that contemporary travel writers continue to use as an antidote to discomfit, from Paul Theroux to an obscure Englishwoman who made the ill-fated decision to make her home on Pitcairn Island and lived to tell the tale.

Andrew X. Pham was broadsided by culture shock. He never expected it to happen when he went to Vietnam. He was returning to a place where he had lived for the first half of his childhood.  He was coming home.

Pham’s parents left when Vietnam was still emerging from its war with the U.S. From the time he was ten, Pham lived with a new language, new customs, and memories of his old home. Nearing the end of his twenties, he’s lost his job, his apartment, and a sister who dies after choosing to become his brother. Faced with the prospect of moving in with his parents, he takes his savings, his bicycle, and a few clothes and gets on a plane to Vietnam. His plan is to bicycle from Saigon to Hanoi and use the story of his journey to propel his career as a freelance writer. He knows the language, he knows the codes of behavior, he’s a seasoned cyclist. What could go wrong?

Thomas Wolfe could have answered that question. Pham enters a country where his memories have been eradicated during the past decades of rebuilding and change. Without knowledge of the progress that’s taken place since the end of the war, he’s disgusted by the poverty that surrounds him. He discovers he’s no longer seen as Vietnamese; he’s a Viet-kieu, one who left for the safety and comfort of another country. Worse still, he’s a Viet-kieu who came back with no gifts for relatives and who is so careful with his money that he’s perceived as stingy. Suddenly Pham is an outsider and an unwelcome one at that. 

Rejected by the people he thought were his own, Pham’s vision fixates on the misshapen, the crippled, the women with with “hungry vacant eyes,” men who “perk up like coyotes” when they see him pulling into town in his American clothes, on his American bicycle. He meets a taxi-dancer whom he thinks he could love, until she discovers he won’t be her avenue to a green card. In Hanoi he becomes the patron of a boy who lives on the streets and is passed on from traveler to traveler. He leaves town without saying goodbye.

“The sight of my roots repulses me. And that shames me deeply.” Pham admits. The only monument that impresses him are the tunnels at Cu Chi and the kindnesses shown him as he makes his journey seem to be outweighed by the anger and envy that he excites along the way. One old man takes him home, gives him a place to sleep, and shares meals with him, telling him “Here is my home, my birthland, and my grave.” A younger man tells him, “Some call you the lost brothers. You are already lost to us.” And Pham at the end of his journey realizes “my search for roots has become my search for home,” and that home is not Vietnam.

His honesty in recounting his multi-leveled odyssey is stark and blunt; the story he tells is a young man’s way of looking at the world. At the same time, this is a tale of adventure through in an unknown land, which Pham describes without overlooking its beauty. His descriptions are riveting and appreciative glimpses of the natural world and his bicycle trip rank right up there with the worst journeys ever taken, in terms of pain and injury. His travels are underpinned with family history and tragedy, both in Vietnam and within the U.S., making readers wonder if the price of immigration may be too high a cost in the long run.~Janet Brown

Storywallah by Neelesh Misra's Mandali (Penguin)

Neelesh Misra is an Indian journalist, musician, writer, and the founder and editor of Gaon Connection, “India’s biggest rural media platform”. He is also the founder and CEO of Content Project Pvt. Ltd, a company that is “home to some of India’s best emerging writers, collectively called the Mandali”. 

Storywallah is a collection of short stories written by the Mandali. All of the writers originally wrote their stories in Hindi. The stories are as varied as the writers who come from all across India. In this collection, Misra features twenty writers including bloggers, teachers, a university professor and journalists. 

Kanchan Pat’s Wildflower is about an Indian daughter named Nemat who was brought up in Scotland by her mother. The mother left Nemat a letter after she died and in the letter asks Nemat to read it “not as a daughter but as a woman”. Now Nemat finds herself going to India, to a small town called Kosi in the mountains. She was going to seek help from the person she most hated - her mother’s lover. Her mother’s letter had caused her anguish but found that she couldn’t hate her mother nor forgive her. She was going to meet Anirudh Thakur which will help her decide “whether she would love Ma or hate her for the rest of her life.”

In Letters by Analuta Raj Nair, the protagonist is a sixty-year old man who is retiring from government service after working for thirty-five years. He had been working on his autobiography when he chanced upon a bundle of letters from a girl named Anamika - his first love. He has never told his wife about her and has never shown her any of the letters. The man wants to include his one and only love story in his autobiography “as if to make a dishonest relationship honest, legitimate” but is afraid to tell his wife of thirty some years. 

Nails by Umesh Pant centers around a girl named Simmi who’s about to get married and questions if she’s doing the right thing when on the day of their engagement, her fiance, Sumit,  says to her, “Yaar, the least you could have done was cut your nails. You know I don’t like these long nails.” Simmi tried to make light of the situation but noticed that her fiance looked more upset than he looked. But his response, “It’s not just a matter of a nail, Simmi” would not leave her mind.

The above are just a taste of the stories you will encounter. The other seventeen stories are all about everyday people living everyday lives. They all share a universal appeal as they focus on family relationships, love and betrayal, doing what’s best for the family or having the family and others decide what’s best for the person in question. Many of the stories are about finding who you really are. Each story is so different yet they all share a common quality, one in which anybody can see themselves as the main character in the stories. ~Ernie Hoyt

Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith (Random House)

How far will far will we go to find the life we were meant to live? How do we learn to use what lives inside us, haunting us? 

Winnie Nguyen, half Vietnamese, half white American, comes to Saigon on a one-way ticket, bringing with her “a passport, two sets of clean clothes, and her own flesh.” The suitcase she carries is almost empty. So is Winnie. She becomes an English teacher because it’s the easiest job for a foreigner to get, she reads cheap novels as her class pretends to work on amorphous assignments, she buys clothes in drab colors that will let her fade into the background. She has no friends yet no reason to return home. When she disappears, nobody, not even the man who has taken her into his life and his bed, has any idea where she might have gone. Winnie has lived without a trace and her disappearance mirrors the way she lived.

Binh is an orphan, brought up by relatives. She’s a rebel, a child without fear, who’s followed faithfully by two brothers. When the boys grow up and leave her, Binh remains in the village, still a girl who follows no rules and has no ambition, until she becomes obsessed with revenge.

Winnie is a woman who has never felt at home in her body. Binh has never been at rest within hers. They wouldn’t have ever met if not for the two brothers who loved Binh and left her when they went off to live in  Saigon. Long, the younger brother, has tried his best to love Winnie. Tan, the older of the two, has been cursed by a death that troubles his dreams and brings Binh back into his life.

This novel begins with a page that holds the names of all the characters, followed by several detailed maps. They are essential clues to the story, which moves with what seems to be a dizzying incoherence between 21st century Saigon and the highlands of Vietnam from colonial times through the Japanese occupation. The characters are so diverse that they seem random. They are not. Each one of them, from the homesick French farmer who yearns for the taste of gougère to the peasant girl who is seduced by a dissolute plantation-owner, from a fortune-teller who can transform his face into a mask of inhuman flexibility to a wealthy villager’s beautiful daughter who goes missing in a forest that’s infested with venomous snakes—they all carry clues to solving the jigsaw puzzle that Violet Kupersmith has skillfully constructed. 

The ghosts of Southeast Asia are a horrific lot that put the pallid spectres of the West to shame. Kupersmith has added a new one to the pantheon, one that can become either a blessing and a torture. But this is not just a ghost story, or a mystery, although it combines both of these elements. Within its rich and enigmatic plot is a satirical examination of expats in a world that they try desperately to sanitize, a portrait of Saigon that embraces its ugliness as firmly as it describes the city’s allure, the psychological dissection of an unraveling personality, and the fragmented history of lost girls who each find their own way of belonging in the world.

Kupersmith has written a novel so compelling that it’s tempting to race through it in one sitting yet it’s complicated enough that it calls for another reading to immediately follow the first. She’s created a world that’s both repulsive and seductive—one that’s gone unvisited until she brought it into life.~Janet Brown

Mistress Oriku : Stories from a Tokyo Teahouse by Matsutaro Kawaguchi (Tuttle)

Originally published as Shigurejaya Oriku in Japanese in 1969 and available for the first time in English, Mistress Oriku : Stories from a Tokyo Teahouse by Matsutaro Kawaguchi and translated by Royall Tyler focuses on the life of the owner of the famous Shigure Teachouse, Mistress Oriku. It is set in the early Showa era, sometime around the 1920s. 

Oriku, who is now in her sixties, grew up in the Asakusa area and is currently talking to another native of Akasuka, Shinkichi, who is in his late twenties, about life in the area during the Meiji period, some forty years ago. Oriku’s Shigure Teahouse which also served as an inn was built along the river in Mukojima, an isolated area on the outskirts of town. The place looked like a farmhouse and contained eight tatami floored rooms. The house specialty was chazuke, green tea over rice, served with clams brought in from Kuwana on the Ise coast. 

Oriku was telling him, “you could drop a line in the river from the garden of my place and catch a sea bass”. She was telling Shinkichi that people jumped in the river from the jetty in the summer, they didn’t swim but just cooled off in it which proves how clean the river was. They were both lamenting on how Tokyo changed over the years and how the Sumida River has become so dirty. 

Oriku was also telling Shikichi, “People nowadays don’t even know what good food is anymore. They have sake with some tuna sashimi, then some shrimp tempura with their rice, and they think they’ve eaten well.” She goes on to tell Shinkichi that people can’t eat sashimi or tempura three days in a row but at the Shigure Teahouse “you can eat clam chazuke three-hundred and sixty-six days of the year and never get tired of it.”

As the two continue to talk, Oriku tells Shinkichi that before she started her restaurant, she worked in the Yoshiwara District, the pleasure quarters which was created by the Tokugawa Shogunate in the 17th century. She was sold to a brothel called the Silver Flower at the age of eighteen. She tells Shinkichi that she was on her way to becoming a courtesan but became the mistress of the owner, and then worked there herself, not as a prostitute but as brothel madam after the owner died. 

At the age of forty, Oriku leaves the Silver Flower to her adopted daughter, Oito and her husband and opens the teahouse. Everybody around her said it was a bad idea but she was adamant about following her own dream. 

Kawaguchi brings to life the Tokyo of bygone days featuring geishas and artisans, actors and musicians performing a certain style of theater such as kabuki and noh. He blends real life historical figures and locations along with the creations of his own imagination. He portrays Oriku as a feminist before her time. She’s strong and passionate, does what she thinks is right and has no shame in taking on a number of lovers but refuses to settle down with any one of them. 

Although Kawaguchi’s Oriku wasn’t born in Edo, she epitomizes the spirit of the true Edokko, a person born and raised in Edo, the former name of Tokyo. Timeslip into the past and enjoy the journey. ~Ernie Hoyt

Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So (Ecco, HarperCollins)

They’re California kids, doing their homework and killing time in their parents’ shops, smoking dope, having sex, wearing teeshirts that extend to the knees of their baggy jeans, stealing packs of their dads’ cigarettes, envying the kid who drives a Mustang—but as one of them says, “carrying...the aftermath of war, genocide, colonialism.” They call themselves Cambos, these children of people who came to the U.S. in flight from the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia’s Auto Genocide, of people who have “clawed their way to a livable and beautiful life,” ”always thinking on the past and worrying for the future.”

As the kids memorize 50 Cent lyrics and watch Boyz in the Hood, hang out in a mall “that did so badly Old Navy shut down,” they balance their parents’ ambitions for them with the weight of the word “survivors.” They attend ceremonies for infants who have come into the world carrying the spirits of dead relatives who have chosen these babies for their rebirth. They put on the robes of monks to ensure that their prayers will allow a dead parent to pass easily into the next life. The simple act of drinking a glass of ice water can provoke a father into saying “There were no ice cubes in the genocide.” Even when they go off to college and begin to enter a larger world, they’re still haunted by the “dreams of the dead...the ghosts of all our suffering.”

At home, their mothers watch Thai soap operas since that’s the closest form of entertainment to what they once knew in Cambodia. A family wedding means “300 Cambos in the Dragon Palace Restaurant” with a singer imported from Phnom Penh. The wife of a man who triumphed over his early years by becoming a doctor in his new country clutches her Louis Vuitton purse and offers an easy way to become rich. All a Khmer boy needs to do is marry a wealthy girl from Cambodia and bring her to the U.S. A young teacher in San Francisco finds a man on a dating app who’s Cambodian and comes from his part of California. Before finalizing the connection, he checks to be certain that the man isn’t some unknown second cousin. His new boyfriend serves him a meal that both of their mothers once cooked for them, but it’s been transformed into health food; “ the essential ingredients were there but it looked disfigured, like it’d been extinct and was then genetically resurrected in a petri dish.”

In the final story of this collection, a mother tells her son “I’ve always considered the genocide to be the source of all our problems and none of them. Know that we’ve always kept on living. What else could we have done?”

The trauma of atrocities becomes part of the genetic code and is passed down to following generations, living in the bodies of the children of survivors as much as the stories of genocide live on as retold memories. “If you think that I’m interesting,” Anthony Veasna So told an interviewer, “it’s probably because you’ve never met someone that’s come from my particular context.”

It’s true that “his particular context” had never been revealed in fiction before. It’s also true that he tells his coming-of-age stories with a sardonic humor and a bitter compassion that’s powerful and irresistible. The tragedy is we enter the lives of his characters only after So’s own life came to an end. He was never able to hold Afterparties as a finished book and he will never write the four other books he had planned to bring into being. Dead at 28, a writer who had already been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Granta, and Zyzzyva, So has turned his first book into his epitaph.~Janet Brown

Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics by Frederick L. Schodt (Kodansha)

Originally published in hardcover in 1983, Manga! Manga! is still the definitive book that introduces the world to Japan’s multi-billion dollar industry - the world of manga or Japanese comics. It is also the first book to take a serious look at the phenomenon in English.. Although it isn’t a bestseller, the book continues to sell and is often used in university classes on Japanese pop culture. This is an updated edition that was published in 1986. It is currently 2021 but this book is still relevant today as it was when it was first published back in the early eighties. It is not a comprehensive history of the subject as that would take hundreds of volumes to accomplish and would require many additions. 

Schodt, who studied Japanese at International Christian University in Japan and graduated in 1972 was awarded a scholarship from Japan’s Ministry of Education to further his education in translation and interpreting. After completing his advanced studies, he and a few students contacted Tezuka Productions, the animation studio started by Osamu Tezuka, to get permission to translate Phoenix into English. 

The Foreword is written by Osamu Tezuka, considered to be the God of Manga. He is also known as the Walt Disney of Japan. He is the creator of not only Phoenix but Tetsuwan Atom , Jungle Emperor and Ribbon no Kishi, which are known in the U.S. as Atom Boy, Kimba the White Lion, and Princess Knight.

Just to give you an idea of the magnitude of this business, in 1984, over five billion books and magazines were produced in Japan. Almost thirty percent of the total were manga in either book or magazine form. Even in 1984, “some enterprising reporters have discovered, Japan now uses more paper for its comics than it does for its toilet paper.”

Unlike American comic books, which usually consists of thirty or so pages with a large number of those pages dedicated to advertisements and is purchased mostly by young boys who read it and adult men who collect them, Japanese comics are first serialized in a comic magazine. They are then compiled into books and can run thousands of pages long. 

Schodt provides a chronological history of the manga starting even before the term manga was used. One of the earliest examples of manga Schodt talks about are the Chojugiga or “Animal Scrolls” by a Buddhist priest named Toba from the twelfth century which comprised of “Walt Disney-style anthropomorphized animals in antics that mock Toba’s calling - the Buddhist clergy.” 

As Japanese manga evolved, from kamishibai which is a form of street theater and storytelling to what it has become today. Manga artists began to gain not only fame but became quite wealthy too. However, the competition is fierce and the work is hard as all the work is usually done by one person - the artist who must think up the storyline, draw the pictures, and meet deadlines. This becomes even more difficult if the artist is writing and drawing manga for multiple publications. 

The latter half of the book introduces the reader to a few examples of Japanese manga. Included are excerpts from Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix (Hi no Tori), Reiji Matsumoto’s Ghost Warrior (Borei Senshi from the series Senjo), Riyoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles (Berusaiyu no Bara and Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen), a comic based on his experiences before, during, and after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. 

The manga business continues to thrive in Japan. One of the most recent manga which caused a social phenomenon was Kimetsu no Yaiba, known to the English-speaking public as Demon Slayer. As with many of its predecessors, the story got its start in one of the comics magazines, was compiled into book form, then an anime series was created, followed by a full-length feature film, not to mention all the merchandising that accompanies successful stories. 

The manga industry continues to grow and has become popular in other countries as well. There seems to be no end in sight for manga and all the would-be manga artists who are hungry for the fame and fortune it may bring. ~Ernie Hoyt

Malaya: Essays on Freedom by Cinelle Barnes (Little a)

“We had everything, then we had nothing. But I always had books and dance.” When Cinelle Barnes is asked about her childhood in Manila, this is how she sums it up, “like the summary of a fairy tale.” But within the space that ought to have been the fairy tale’s happy ending, Barnes comes perilously close to losing everything—books, dance, and her strength. She leaves the Philippines when an aunt on Long Island decides to adopt her and gives her everything she wants, including a Communion-white dress as a gift on her seventeenth birthday, which she will wear to INS offices as soon as her adoption is finalized. There an immigration officer tells her she’s two years too late, to become naturalized by adoption she should have been there before her sixteenth birthday.

Paralyzed by depression, Barnes lies in bed at her sister’s house, unable to brush her hair or her teeth. “My spirit or gumption or essence departed from my body.” Barnes’s sister knew of only one way to cure her, by forcing her to move and took her to work at the cleaning company their brother has launched. Slowly Barnes returns to life, graduating from high school and working her way through college as a cleaner, a waitress, a nanny—jobs that don’t require proof of legal residency. She doesn’t choose U.S. citizenship until she has a degree and is married, with a child. A year after that her first book, Monsoon Mansion, is published and Barnes decides her epitaph will include the words “telling stories that dragged them out of their fiction.”

Her stories are mosaic—a tile here, another in the opposite corner. Their jagged honesty drags readers out of their fiction and the fluid beauty of her writing keeps attentions riveted until her entire story comes into focus. Barnes’s success happens in spite of this country, not because of it. She shows that even for a smart, ambitious, determined immigrant who arrives from a former U.S. territory with English as a primary language, brown skin ensures a long series of barriers and micro-aggressions. She makes it plain that sad stories kill as efficiently as cigarettes, if they aren’t brought to the surface to be heard. She flinches when her child tells her “I want to be a writer” and hopes the little girl will choose to be a physicist instead.

Soon after her daughter is born, living in a southern state where her husband’s family has roots going back for over 200 years. Barnes longs for some facet of life that belongs to her alone and takes up surfing lessons. She finds a teacher who gives lessons for free, tough, blonde, looking like a character from Blue Crush, and a mother. Happy to have met another woman with “a proclivity for dangerous sports, Barnes invites her new friend to come over for tea. When she asks the woman what she did before taking up surfing, she’s told she’s talking to a former drug delivery girl who never got caught. “Nobody will stop a young blonde girl, that’s the truth. We just get away with things, you know?”

Barnes, who never had the luxury of breaking the smallest law for fear of deportation, who couldn’t get on a plane or even order a cocktail, who lived “in perpetual hiding” forces a grin in response and hides her anger. “I’m Brown, an immigrant. I’m forever clean.” And in one story of one encounter, she nails white privilege to the wall, leaving none of us white women exempt.

Cinelle Barnes has laid claim to the personal essay and has made that form her own. Her stories etch themselves upon the minds of their readers, with their fierce tenderness and unwavering truth. I hope with all of my white-privileged heart that her next book finds a home with a publisher that is not owned by Amazon.~Janet Brown

The Book of Saladin by Tariq Ali (Verso)

The Book of Saladin is the second book in Tariq Ali’s Islam Quintet. Although it is the second book in the series, each book can be read as a stand alone novel. The story is based on the real life historical figure of Al-Nasir Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub. Salal al-Din or Saladin as he is known to Westerners was a Sunni Muslim Kurd who became the first Sultan of Egpyt and Syria and served under the sovereignty of the Caliph of Baghdad. He was also the Muslim leader who led a campaign against the Franj (the Franks or Holy Crusaders) and retook the city of al-Kuds (al-Quds) which is the Arabic name for Jerusalem. 

Many of the other male characters are also based on actual historical figures such as Saladin’s father, brothers, uncles, and nephews. Ibn Maymun is the great Jewish philosopher who is also known as Maimonedes. The women are Ali’s creation as there are no records of the women from the Sultan’s era. 

In Ali’s novel, the story is narrated in three parts by Isaac ibn Yacob. It starts off in the city of Cairo, Egypt, then continues in Damascus in present day Syria and the conclusion of the story leads to al-Kuds or Jerusalem in the Levant which includes present day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and most of Turkey east of the Euphrates. 

Ibn Maymun came to visit Ibn Yacob on a cold night in 1181 according to the Christian calendar. On the same evening, Yacob receives another visitor which he surmised was for his friend. The visitor was unknown to Yacob until Ibn Maymun addressed him as “Commander of the Brave”. Ibn Yacob realizes he is in the presence of the Sultan.

The Sultan has come to Ibn Maymun to ask for advice on finding a scribe to whom he could dictate his memoirs. It is Ibn Maymun who recommends Ibn Yacob but suggests but tells the Sultan, “Your request poses a problem. You are never in one city for too long. Either the scribe must travel with you, or we will have to find another one in Damascus.”

The Sultan surprises both Ibn Maymun and Ibn Yacob. He says, “And a third city beckons. I hope to be visiting al-Kuds soon.” al-Kuds or Jerusalem is still under the power of the Crusaders. It was an occupied city. Ibn recognizes that the Sultan has just announced his intention to take al-Kuds back from the non-Believers. The following day, the Sultan begins to dictate his memoirs.

Ibn Yacob has no choice but to follow the Sultan to Damascus and then to Jerusalem to continue to write about the Sultan’s life, his thoughts and his exploits. As the scribe to the sultan, he spends more time in the palace than he does at home which causes a rift in his marriage. To complicate matters further, he made a surprise visit home, only to find his good friend Ibn Mayum on top of his wife!

Ali’s attention to historical detail makes this fictitious biography and memoir not only entertaining but educational as well. The story still hold true today as the forces of Islam and Christianity continue to clash. Even now, in the 21st century, the future of Palestine and the Middle East is still in turmoil with no resolution in sight. It makes you wonder if religion is actually, “the root of all evil”. ~Ernie Hoyt