Waiting to be Arrested at Night by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua L. Freeman (Penguin Press)

“No wall can stop the wind,” a Uyghur proverb says and Tahir Hamut Izgil knows this is true. In 1996, he is imprisoned for three years when Chinese authorities stop him as he leaves his home in Xinjiang to study in Turkey. Accused of “taking illegal and confidential materials out of the country,” this young poet has to rebuild his life when he‘s released just before the turn of the century.

He marries and makes a comfortable and secure living for his wife and two daughters as a film director for movies, television shows, and commercials. But his true vocation lies in writing poetry. Over the next twelve years, he nurtures this gift within a network of Uyghur writers.

Uyghur people have lived in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region for millennia, perhaps before the beginning of the Christian Era. Followers of Islam with presumably Turkish origins, most of them live in the capital city of Urumqi, as does Izgil. In recent years, the Chinese government has accused them of plotting separatism and when a spurt of violence erupts in Urumqi in 2009, the clampdown upon this ethnic group is swift and draconian. 

Mass arrests become routine, with Uyghurs accused of “fabricated crimes” and whisked away to re-education centers. Izgil is taken into police custody, extensively interrogated, and put under surveillance. 

In 2011, the government bans traditional Arabic greetings and orders people to change their names from those that have Islamic origins. The Chinese flag is raised over mosques. Radios are confiscated and banned from sale. Inspections of mobile phones routinely end in the arrest of the people who own them.

Izgil and his wife are called into police headquarters for fingerprinting, an ordeal that lasts three hours and includes taking blood samples, ‘voice prints,” and facial images. When asked about his religious faith, Izgil says he has none. When they’re finally released, Izgil’s wife, who has resisted any thought of immigration, says “We have to leave the country.”

They give away their copies of the Quran, they purge their phones and computers of anything that might be compromising, and they embark on a torturous, convoluted path that will lead them from their homeland. After a Uyghur academic is given life imprisonment under accusations of separatism, Izgil keeps warm clothing and thick footwear by his bedside in case the police come to take him away in the middle of the night.

“I wish China would just conquer the world,” one of Izgil’s friends says bitterly, “Then we would all be the same…not alone in our suffering.” Another says in a poem, “We came from nowhere else and we will not leave for anywhere.” Not long after Izgil and his family emigrate to the United States, this man is sentenced to 16 years in prison.

Once they are safely in another country, Izgil calls his parents but not even this message of reassurance goes unpunished. Soon after this, his mother’s phone and ID card are both confiscated. 

As they make another home in a strange place, “we burn with guilt,” Izgil admits, “Our bodies might still be here but our souls are still back home.”

Although this memoir is eloquent and illuminating, its narrative is told under a different timescape, twisting with personal history, conversations that are scrupulously detailed, and a wealth of poems. Reading it gives not just another perspective but a whole new form of psychology, one that was constructed to survive a world that could well have been invented by Kafka, one that readers are privileged to experience at a comfortable distance.~Janet Brown

The Flowers of Buffoonery by Osamu Dazai, translated by Sam Bett (New Directions)

Osamu Dazi is the pen name of Shuji Tsushima, a Japanese writer who was born in the rural town of Kanagi, currently a part of Goshogawara City, in Aomori Prefecture. His most famous novel is 人間失格 (Ningen Shikkaku), translated into English as No Longer Human. 

The Flowers of Buffoonery is a prequel to No Longer Human and became available for the first time in English in 2023. It was first published as 道化の華 (Douke no Hana) in the literary journal Japanese Romanticism Vol.1 No.3 in 1935. It was published in book form as 晩年 (Ban’nen) in 1936 by Sunagoya Shobo. 

The story features Yozo Oba, the protagonist of No Longer Human, convalescing in a seaside sanatorium in Kanagawa Prefecture after an attempted double suicide with a young woman. The woman perished but Yozo was saved by a passing fisherman. 

Yozo Oba is staying at a place called Blue PInes Manor while recuperating from his failed suicide attempt. The story takes place over four days with Yozo’s friends and family coming to visit him. They try to keep Yozo in good spirits and avoid talking about Sono, the woman he was planning on dying with. 

The director of the sanatorium and the nurse that works there also drift in and out of Yozo’s room to see how well he is doing and to check his mental stability. While staying at the sanatorium, Yozo decides to write a book with Yozo Oba as the main character. 

The story opens with Yozo reading his own lines from his book he is trying to write. It starts off with “Welcome to Sadness. Population one.” He tries to tell the story about how and why he survived. He continues to write in the first person, “It was me—these are the hands that pulled Sono underwater. In my insolence, I prayed for my salvation in the same breath that I prayed Sono would die”. 

Yozo Oba isn’t the only patient at Blue Pines Manor. When he was brought in, there were thirty-six tuberculosis patients. Two of them were in critical condition, eleven had mild cases, and the rest were in remission. 

Yozo was staying in Room 4 of the Eastern Wing of the sanatorium, a place reserved for “special cases” such as himself. There are six rooms in the Eastern Wing, two of which are currently vacant. In Room One is a male college student. In Rooms Five and Six are a couple of young women. All three are recovering patients. 

Although the story is rather short at just shy of one hundred pages, the emotions displayed by Yozo and his friends and family show Dazai’s understanding of the human condition. 

Yozo Oba is of course based on Dazai’s own life experiences and he often makes fun of how people react to different situations. He makes Yozo act lighthearted when he is around his friends who can joke about a serious subject like suicide and yet Yozo’s innermost thoughts are quite the opposite of how he acts. 

It’s difficult to sympathize with Yozo Oba. You cannot know if he’s being serious or if he just has a chip on his shoulder and is a bitter person at heart. If you have also read No Longer Human, you will know what becomes of him. 

Reading Dazai’s stories can be quite depressing at times and yet he manages to add a bit of humor so the reader won’t give up in disgust. Even if you cannot sympathize with Yozo Oba or Osamu Dazai, you can’t help but to continue reading to find out what happens in the end. ~Ernie Hoyt

Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang (Random House)

In 1978 a Taiwan manufacturer established the Taiwan Handbag Factory in an isolated corner of Guangdong Province. It was the only foreign factory to have come to the small town of Dongguan, a place without railway connections or roads. It hired local labor but soon needed to augment that supply with migrant labor from rural China. Two years later Deng Xaoping established the first of China’s Special Economic Zones in Shenzhen, fifty miles from Dongguan. 

By the 1990s, Dongguan had become a manufacturing hub, with factories for electronics and computer parts standing beside the ones that made toys, clothing and shoes. It became famous for its “factories and prostitution,” a city “built for machines, not people.” Instead of streets, it boasted ten-lane highways.

In 2004, Leslie T. Chang, a bilingual reporter for the Wall Street Journal, came to Dongguan. Her goal was to report on migrant labor in that city, a tsunami of workers who had been streaming to its factories for two decades. She stayed in Dongguan for 1-2 weeks every month for two years.

A young woman herself, who is fluent in Chinese, Chang found it easy to gain the confidence of young women who worked in the factories, who at that time made up 70% of the labor force and one-third of the migratory flow. Homeless until marriage, by virtue of their gender these girls were never considered permanent parts of their family households. When parents realized their daughters could become financial assets in factory towns, they encouraged the girls to take that leap.

Chang follows the lives of two girls, Min who left home at 16 and Chunming who came to Dongguan when she was just a year older. Through them she chronicles the progress that could be made by girls who have left their villages.

Although social pressure may have sent these girls to work in factories, what keeps them there is freedom and mobility. If they dislike their workplace, they change jobs, going to “talent markets,” places where job fairs meet speed dating. Rapid-fire interviews are conducted to find workers who are “female, pretty, and single,” the younger and the taller the better. Lies and subterfuge are common, girls who have lost their identity cards and procured another go by a new name for as long as that’s necessary. Men are less desirable job candidates in this fast-paced employment arena and are usually confined to maintenance positions, while young women find their way into office jobs.

Within a year, Chunming goes from making 300 yuan a month to 1500. Min, after having her identity card, mobile phone, and her money stolen from her, goes from living on the streets to “building a new life from scratch,” getting a job in a Hong Kong-owned handbag factory where her salary is high enough to make her the dominant figure in her rural family.

Factory girls are the leaders of a social revolution. The money they bring to their parents give them a position of power. At the Lunar New Year, they are the ones who present envelopes of money to their elders and household decisions rest with them. As they gain positions of status in the workplace, they often outrank the men they date and use that power to their advantage. Chunming’s stock phrase when finding a man didn’t measure up to her standards is “Let’s just be friends, then,” which she often pronounces in a matter of minutes.

Pragmatic and ambitious, these girls set personal goals that dominate their time away from their jobs. Chunming keeps a diary and studies Ben Franklin’s Thirteen Rules of Morality. When direct sales come to China, promising a route to prosperity, speaking skills are a path to success and young women flock to classes that give them that ability. English is so in demand that the Taiwan-owned Yue Yuen plant that manufactured Nike, Adidas, and Reebok, offers English classes onsite at their gated facility, a place that also has a kindergarten, a movie theater, and a hospital.

Girls who had come from small farms find they need polish to achieve success and attend “academies” that tell them how to dress, eat, smile, pour tea, use the telephone, and when it was necessary, how to drink. (“Do you know how to make cocktails?” one of Chunming’s friends asks Chang.)

Chang wrote Factory Girls twenty years ago. It prompts a deep curiosity about what became of these upwardly-mobile, ambitious young women and if their effect on society continues to hold its power. A sequel is screaming to be written, if only to continue the stories of those indomitable girls, Min and Chunming. ~Janet Brown

Other Rivers by Peter Hessler (Penguin Press)

Of all the books I’ve read about the Covid years, whether they are fiction or memoirs, there’s only one I would ever reread. This is one that was written in 2020, Wuhan Diary by the sixty-five-year-old author, Fang Fang (Asia By the Book, December 2020). First published online from January to March of 2020, then translated into more than twenty languages, including English, and published by HarperCollins, this journal showed the day-by-day progression of the virus and the means by which it was suppressed, described in deeply human terms. For me, nothing else has measured up to Fang Fang’s reportage, for which she has been almost erased. She is no longer published in China and her name can no longer appear in that country’s press, nor can she be interviewed by any outlet. Despite this silencing, she remains hopeful, telling another writer, “I believe it won’t be like this forever.”

In his latest book, Other Rivers, Peter Hessler fails to reach the standard set by Fang Fang, although he was also living in China at the time she published her writing. A man who first came to China in 1996, Hessler has lived and worked in that country for over ten years. In the autumn of 2019, he returned with his wife (Leslie Chang, author of Factory Girls, who has matched her husband’s duration in China) and their nine-year-old twin daughters. 

Hired by Sichuan University in Chengdu, Hessler is greeted with a sardonic observation. Noting that he came to work in Cairo just as the 2011 Arab Spring with its subsequent massacres began and then returned to the US when Trump win the 2016 election, a writer at a dinner party predicts that with Hessler’s return to China, “something bad is probably going to happen.” Within three months, Covid erupts in Wuhan.

As a journalist, Hessler had a stunning opportunity to bring this time to life and at times he does that. His account of his daughters’ introduction to Chengdu Experimental Primary Elementary School where they are the only foreign students and the only ones who have no knowledge of the Chinese language, is fascinating, although given less attention than it might have received. The interruption that Covid imposes is perhaps partially to blame but the girls have a full year in the school after that. At the end of the book, Hessler admits his children’s time in a Chinese public school was the most challenging part of our time in Chengdu,” something a reader would never guess from his accounts of that “challenge.”

To be fair, he has a few challenges of his own, ones that are prompted by what seems a lot like naivete. Since English language classics are available in Chengdu, there are a wide assortment of books from which to choose, so it seems peculiar that Animal Farm is one of the two texts chosen for his class on English Composition. Instead of glossing over Orwell’s political satire, Hessler teaches it in tandem with 1984, a recipe for disaster.

In his nonfiction class, he decides to turn its center-point to journalism, sending his students out into the city to observe and report. When one of his students does a profile on her VPN dealer, Hessler identifies this as “edgy research,” but then has her read it out loud in front of the class. “I wasn’t sure if Yidi’s subject matter was too sensitive,” he says, “...by the time she was halfway finished, I was convinced that I had put her at risk.” Considering his “over ten years” in China, this seems negligent to the point of stupidity.

Later, when Wuhan is no longer under lockdown, Hessler visits and interviews Fang Fang, although this is forbidden. But why worry? By the time this is published, he’s back in the US. At the end of March, 2021, his request for a contract renewal is denied by Sichuan University and he and his family return to the peace of rural Colorado.

A writer without a selectivity index, Hessler has no ability to focus. Everything he has ever seen or experienced he tosses in a gigantic salad, recounted in a random fashion that is painfully staccato. His return to the city and the students that he depicted in his first book, River Town, is thrown into his time in Chengdu, no doubt in an effort to increase the page count in Other Rivers. Although he achieves over 400 pages, at least half of them could have been cut to make this a better book, presenting an inevitable question. Where was his editor? ~Janet Brown

Bangkok Babylon by Jerry Hopkins (Tuttle Publishing)

Among any of us who have spent time in Southeast Asia, a common observation is prevalent—that nobody is more tedious than an old white guy who’s rooted to a Bangkok bar stool. Jerry Hopkins, a man who has occupied many a bar stool in Bangkok (and other places), not only disputes that point of view, he refutes it. Telling the stories of men he has met on twenty-five different bar stools in Thailand’s capital, he proves his point of view. At least during his lifetime, some of the most intriguing people on earth were sitting in some of the most notorious bars in Bangkok. In Bangkok Babylon, he tells their stories and there’s not a boring one in the entire book.

Only a few of these are ones Hopkins wasn’t told directly by the profile subjects. He never met the man who has been called the inspiration for the Marlon Brando figure in Apocalypse Now, Tony Poe, nor the pianist who played for years at the best hotel in Bangkok and who turned out to be a vicious pedophile. In the case of the pianist, Hopkins quotes the lengthy confession that Eric Rossner sent to a Thai newspaper and briefly describes a videotape Rossner had made of time he spent with a ten-year-old girl. Tony Poe’s story comes from Poe’s close friend and colleague, Jack Shirley, a man who had been a self-described “journeyman killer” employed by the DEA and who worked with Poe in at least one successful assassination. 

These stories are counterbalanced by twenty-two others that are much less lurid but equally fascinating. Hopkins’ best friend, whom he terms an “urban guerilla priest,” is a man who’s devoted his life to the largest Bangkok slum, a rebel who knows how to say the Mass in Hmong and knocks back bottles of Heineken. Father Joe is a warrior who has battled the Thai power structure successfully enough that the slum he lives in now has a school, a 24-hour medical clinic, a credit union, and housing for orphans and abandoned children. His story is followed by interviews with the man who made Lonely Planet’s guide to Thailand a bible to travelers all around the world and with the college drop-out who turned abused elephants into musicians with their own symphony orchestra.

A man who once made his living by dressing up as Friar Tuck and selling advice at Renaissance Faires before making a life for himself in Thailand tells Hopkins “If you’re going to get a story out of me, you’ll have to pull and twist, and then make it up, because it’s not there.” He was wrong. If Hopkins had one religious belief, it was “Thou shalt not make things up.” Disdaining Somerset Maugham as “a predatory gossip,” Hopkins had a thousand untold stories that he refused to write, because, he said, “they aren’t mine to tell.” Every living man whom he interviewed for Bangkok Babylon was given the right of refusal. They each read their profile before the book was published and all of them approved what had been written.

The result is an oral history told by a group of eccentric expats to a reporter who likens himself to Forrest Gump, a man in the right place at the right time, who decided when he was young that he’d “travel the world, meet interesting people, and write about them.” Fortunately, one of the “interesting people” whose story is included in this book is Hopkins himself, a journalist who wrote for Rolling Stone, booked “kooks” for Steve Allen’s television show, had the first head-shop in Los Angeles, and was on the New York Times bestseller list for his biography of Jim Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive, which is still in print since its debut in 1980.

Of Bangkok Babylon, Hopkins says somewhat wistfully, “ this book may be a celebration of a part of Southeast Asia that is sliding into the past…” Yes. It is—and a fine celebration at that.~Janet Brown