Burma: Rivers of Flavor by Naomi Duguid (Artisan Books)

Whether you call it Burma or Myanmar, the country that lies below India, adjoins China, and borders Thailand, is a huge collection of highly diverse ethnic groups, each with their own customs and cuisine. “A cultural crossroads,” says Naomi Duguid, in her latest compendium of recipes, photographs, and stories, Burma: Rivers of Flavor.

Duguid has spent decades traveling through Asia with her family, steeping herself in daily life and learning different forms of home cooking. She first went to Burma over thirty years ago and has spent time roaming around the country, leaving the cities to learn the flavors of the Shan, the Karen, the Rakhine. Her photographs are generous in showing who she met and what she saw; her stories are enticing glimpses of a place that remains largely untraveled. From monasteries to market towns, from the serenity of 15th century temples to the devastation left by Cyclone Nargis, Duguid goes there and takes us with her.

But the glory of her books lies in the food she shares through recipes—and her latest is perhaps the most accessible to the Western cook. In common with their Southeast Asian neighbors, cooks in Burma use fish sauce and chilies and a multiplicity of fresh herbs. But the preparation involved is much easier, with fewer steps involved than in many Southeast Asian dishes—and the flavors encompass the Subcontinent and China too, with a distinctive local flair.

“Classic Sour Soup” is made with a fish stock, tamarind pulp, and bok choi—but “in Mandalay,” Duguid tells us, “…when the tall kapok trees are in bloom, cooks add their velvety, faded-red flowers.” Not a flavor the average cook will employ but will yearn to taste—this is Naomi Duguid’s trademark, to make home cooks long to leave their kitchens and eat in other places.

Bland potatoes become incendiary when a Rakhine cook is finished with them—first she boils them and then tosses them in a fiery shallot oil that’s been pumped up with lots of chilies. It’s a potato salad that will spice up potluck picnics in an unforgettable fashion.

And she tells how to make the country’s most famous dish—mohinga, a fish soup that is far more complicated than most of the other recipes but so very much worth the time and effort that it requires. With her customary generosity, Duguid gives both the Rakhine and the Rangoon versions of this –and tells a story attesting to the regional loyalty toward this “classic breakfast food.” Apparently no region can stomach another’s mohinga, which makes at least one prospective eater want to embark on a mohinga tour of Burma.

Duguid’s new book is a smaller size than her earlier ones, which makes it easier to use in the kitchen—and it is certain to be used. Perhaps more than any other cuisine she has explored, Burma’s is the most user-friendly to the Western cook, with hearty cold-weather dishes of stews and chutneys as well as salads, crepes, and desserts for lighter meals.

But when her book is first opened, it will keep readers going from picture to story to recipe, exploring Burma for hours in the company of a woman who is eager to share it. Burma: Rivers of Flavor may be the cheapest ticket to another country that you will ever buy.~Janet Brown

Opium Fiend by Steven Martin (Villard Books)

Perhaps the first sign of incipient addiction is the habit of collecting. Steven Martin provides a story all too familiar to many of us, receiving little packets of coins in the mail when he was a boy, until the day he was threatened with legal collection for unpaid packets. His father returned his entire collection but the damage was done. Martin’s life was dominated by the need to corner the market in objects he loved—and in Thailand, he learned to love opium pipes.

The paraphernalia of the opium user is arcane and lovely, the lamps, the pipes, the scrapers, the boxes, the beds. Martin arrived in Southeast Asia early enough to make the obligatory and occasional pilgrimage to opium dens in Laos, where he became entranced by the objects used in them. His urge to collect something unique and beautiful was fulfilled by the trappings of the opium smoker, and while collecting these things, he became an obsessive expert on the subject.

A large portion of Martin’s book is devoted to the history of opium use in China and the United States, with a wealth of photographs. His collection becomes so exhaustive and valuable that he bequeaths it to the University of Idaho.

Then what has been a dispassionate examination of the art of opium smoking becomes deeply personal. With his life given over to the appreciation of the trappings of opium, Martin meets a collector who smokes in a way that honors the implements and the ritual of the drug. As an aesthete, Martin falls in love with both the ceremony and the sharpened contemplation that comes with opium.

The progression of his addiction and of his altered relationship with the world in general makes compelling reading—and his account of detoxification at Thailand’s famous Wat Tham Krabok, where addicts are subjected to a racking regimen of emetics, is worth a book in itself.

Martin makes a convincing case for high-quality opium, chandu, the liquid essence of the drug. As long as he sticks to that, he functions, he claims, at peak performance. However on a trip to Europe, he is introduced to the dross, the scrapings of the pipe residue, and his experience becomes a ravenous one—harrowing and expensive.

The world of the expatriate in Thailand is very small and Martin comes into the orbit of an American woman who takes over his story, an act that usually occurred to anyone who encountered Roxanna Brown. A tiny woman with a history in Southeast Asia that novels are made of, Brown was a connoisseur of chandu, which she used regularly and judiciously. Martin is horrified by the Spartan paucity of her opium accessories and they strike a deal. He gives her the implements befitting the drug she uses and she supplies him with the drug—for a fee. But Brown is horrified when she learns that Martin smokes between twenty and thirty pipes a day; she smokes no more than six or eight. The rest of the time she resorts to the efficiency of micro-doses—one drop on the tongue is the equivalent to five pipes.

But Martin is a slave to the ritual, his “nightly black mass,” and he succumbs to “nostalgia for the pipe.” But even in Thailand, opium is wickedly expensive. When he and Brown join economic forces to buy a bottle of chandu, his share of the purchase comes to four thousand dollars, or 120,000 baht. Even for a well-paid expat, that would be two months salary, and neither Martin nor Brown fall into that economic category. When Martin begins to sell items of his collection to pay for his opium, his original addiction wins over the hunger for opium and he goes to Wat Tham Krabok, which cures for nothing—but only once..

For Brown, things do not end that well. Eating opium puts a terrible strain on the digestive system, which is “frozen into hibernation by the drug.” When she makes a trip to the states, she is arrested and accused of electronic fraud, allowing her signature to be used for falsified appraisals of Southeast Asian art, a subject upon which she is an expert. A woman with Thai nationality as well as being a U.S. citizen, Roxanna Brown is considered a flight risk and is thrown into an immigration detention center in Seattle. She dies in her cell in agony from a perforated ulcer, an offshoot, Martin says, of opium eating.

On the night of her death, Steven Martin was in Bangkok, “weightlessly suspended as though floating in a warm sea.” Opium had reclaimed him after detox; whether it still dominates his life is perhaps another story, another book.~Janet Brown

In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner (Simon & Schuster)

“Your father may have brought you wings, Raami. But it is I who must to teach you to fly. I want you to understand this. This is not a story.” Raami is a seven-year-old girl with a leg damaged by polio, whose father taught her that words could make her fly and that stories are the gift life brings to those who listen. She yearns to walk with the grace of her beautiful mother, to run as freely as her little sister, but her father, Cambodia’s Tiger Prince, teaches her the power of words and the ability to transform her world into poetry.

And a lovely world it is. Every morning Raami’s father leaves their gated villa, wanders through the streets of Phnom Penh and comes with a poem to write. The family is of royal blood, the descendants of King Sisowath, except for Raami’s mother. “Our family,” she tells her daughter, “is like a bouquet, each stem and blossom perfectly arranged.”

And then the bouquet disintegrates when the Khmer Rouge enter Phnom Penh and send the city’s residents onto the highways that lead into the countryside. Hastily Raami’s family throw what they will need into their car—jewelry stitched into an old pillow, food, Raami’s treasured copy of the Reamker, the Ramayana, and in her father’s pocket his fountain pen and the small leather notebook that goes with him everywhere.

Deep in the Cambodian countryside, the family finds that little they brought is of any use to them. The world is new and inexplicable; only Raami’s mother knows how to survive without servants or the safety of a walled garden. The rules have all changed. Religion and education have been swallowed up by the new force which is Angkar, The Organization. Soldiers in black look for class enemies. When they ask Raami to give her father’s name, she announces it proudly. Sisowath rings in the air like a death sentence.

The Tiger Prince is well-known for his courage and his poetry; even away from Phnom Penh peasants smile when they see his face. He gives himself up, telling his captors that the rest of the family are commoners who are relatives of his wife. Raami hears him writing in the dark, tearing a page from his notebook; the next morning he is carried away in an oxcart while his daughter begs him for one more story.

The remaining family is torn apart. Raami, her mother, and her sister are taken to an old peasant couple who have always longed for children and see the three strangers as an answer to their deepest wish. “Don’t forget who you are,” Raami’s mother tells her as she sees her daughter learn to love the rural life. But under Angkar, happiness is a treacherous state and Raami’s mother is forced to teach her oldest daughter that the only way to survive is to put memories of the past in the farthest reaches of her brain.

Ripped from their peasant family after the death of Raami’s baby sister, she and her mother sink deeper into hunger, exhaustion, and the madness of the Pol Pot years. By the end of the book, their deaths seem inevitable, as Angkar puts them to work excavating what seems to be a gigantic gravesite.

The opening dedication of this novel provides a powerful clue to how it will end. “In the memory of my father,” Vaddey Ratner writes, “Neak Ang Mecha Sisowath Ayuravann.” The name rings like a clear bell. It’s the name of Raami’s father.

This book is a novel because, to tell her own story with the depth that she wanted, Vaddey Ratner needed to create thoughts and speech and feelings that as a small child she could neither remember nor completely comprehend. She has taken lives that were snuffed out and lives that held on in spite of unimaginable cruelty and turned what some cynically call a “misery memoir” to a story that is mythic in its scope and description. The beauty of Cambodia, the courage of its people, and the horror of its recent history is told with the resonance and poetry of Raami’s beloved Reamker. This is an unforgettable narrative and a tribute to the courage of Vaddey Ratner’s parents.

Cambodia is attempting to erase the Pol Pot years. In the Shadow of the Banyan helps to ensure that the world, and the Khmer people, will always remember the years between 1975 and 1979 when a group of Cambodians did its best to destroy their beautiful country, and failed.~Janet Brown

This review was first published in the International Examiner.