Of Monkey Bridges and Banh Mi Sandwiches by Oanh Ngo Usadi (O&O Press)

When Oanh Ngo Usadi and her siblings talked about winning the lottery, their father told them “We already won the lottery by being here in America.” He was a man who had lost his successful businesses and his Saigon home after Vietnam was reunified, who took his family to live in the countryside and then got them on a boat to another country. “Turning back is not an option,” he told his family and they never have.

When Saigon fell, Oanh’s father said, “This is our home. We’re staying here.” Even when he was forced to take them to live as peasants in a rural province, this man gave his children the gift of appreciating what they had--a taste of the first durian produced by their orchard, the color and fragrance of the blossoming trees, the celebration of Tet. But he was foresighted enough to bring gold and jewelry that would ensure safety in the future, stitched into the clothing that his children wore when they left Saigon.

Oanh and her brothers learned to use an outdoor privy, to think of wilted banana leaves as toilet paper, to cross bridges made of logs that were tied together with vines, “monkey bridges,” called that name because using them made people stoop like monkeys. They learned never to waste rice and to listen for interlopers when their father used a forbidden radio to hear news from broadcasts of Voice of America. 

After being held at gunpoint by an envious neighbor and nearly killed when robbers came to steal the community’s supply of valuable fertilizer, Oanh’s father realized it was time to leave Vietnam.  On a small fishing boat crowded with almost 160 people, engulfed in the odors of “sweat, vomit, urine, the sea,” after three days of “misery and boredom,” he brought his family to a holding site in Malaysia and eventually to the United States.

In Port Arthur, Texas, Oanh took on a new importance when she picked up English more easily than her parents. She was the one who took the rent each month to the curmudgeonly landlord and told him about any needed repairs. She was the one to successfully plead her own case when the school she attended tried to demote her from 5th to 3rd grade. Within three years she no longer needed ESL classes and she had learned how to stand up for herself.

Her parents found jobs in a relative’s bakery but her father had dreams of going into business for himself with a banh mi sandwich shop. “I’m going to give McDonald’s a run for its money,” he told his family and when he brought his dream to life, it was a family affair into which everybody poured their energy .

His other ambition was that his children go to college and that he would pay for it. Oanh’s older siblings began to study SAT handbooks and when Oanh explored the books for herself, she “fell in love with English.” 

“In a land of immigrants, a sense of belonging was possible. It just needed time,” she wrote in an essay before leaving for Rice University. Time was what her father gave her--a life of possibility and accomplishment.

A book that carries hope and fulfilled dreams, Oanh’s memoir is a tribute to a man who refused to turn back and who instilled persistence and ambition in his children. More than ever,  Of Monkey Bridges and Banh Mi Sandwiches is essential reading for us all.~Janet Brown

The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan (Del Rey)

真 - the kanji character for “TRUTH”. LuLing Liu Young has written this at the top of a sheet of paper followed by, “These are the things I know are true”. She then writes her name, the names of her two husbands, “both of them dead and our secrets gone with them”, and her daughter’s name Luyi. But there is one name she cannot remember. She only recalls being brought up by a nursemaid named Precious Auntie who once mentioned it. 

So begins Amy Tan’s tale of a Chinese-American woman and her immigrant mother in The Bonesetter’s Daughter. The first half of the book is told by the daughter, who has recently found a stack of papers she forgot about, clipped together in her bottom right desk drawer. The pages were all written in Chinese. Ruth recalls her mother saying, “Just some old things about my family. My story, begin little-girl time. I write for myself, but maybe you read, then you see how I grow up, come to this country.”  

Ruth felt guilty for neglecting it and decided she would try to translate one sentence a day. It took Ruth an hour to translate the first sentence which starts out as “These are the things I know are true.” The next evening Ruth translated another sentence, “My name is LuLing Liu Young”. This took her only five minutes. This was followed by the name of her two husbands. Ruth wasn’t aware that there was another man in her mother’s life. 

Ruth later finds another stack of papers all written in Chinese and written in the same style as the stack she found in her desk drawer. “HEART” was written at the top of the page in Chinese. It takes Ruth about ten minutes to translate the first sentence. “These are things I should not forget.” So begins the tale of her mother and the nursemaid called Precious Auntie. 

Precious Auntie’s often told LuLing about her father. She told LuLing that he was the Famous Bonesetter from the Mouth of the Mountain, and was the man who found dragon bones in a cave and used them to treat any type of ailment. LuLing remembers when she was about six, her nursemaid handed her a scrap of paper and said with her hands, “My family name. The name of all the bonesetters”. She told LuLing, “Never forget his name”. Unfortunately, it’s a name that LuLing can’t remember no matter how hard she tries and it still torments her now.

Luling writes in her notes, “Precious Auntie, what is our name? Come help me remember. I’m not a little girl anymore. I’m not afraid of ghosts. Are you still mad at me? Don’t you recognize me? I am LuLing, your daughter.”

The Bonesetter’s Daughter is as much a mystery as it is a human tale of the relationship between a mother and daughter. It is about family and family secrets and the immense power of love and what a mother will do to ensure the happiness of her child. What is the family secret? What is Precious Auntie’s real name? Amy Tan sets the tone and pace of the story that draws you in and keeps you there until all your questions are answered. ~Ernie Hoyt

Family in Six Tones by Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Van Cao (Penguin Random House)

Lan Cao’s life has been shaped by loss and love. At the age of thirteen, she lost her country when she  left Vietnam and came to America as a refugee. When she was almost forty, she became a mother, who from the very beginning, believed she and her daughter were “sinewed together.” Both experiences were “volcanic, invasive,” “steep paths filled with detours and stumbling blocks,” presenting her with new cultures to learn.

Harlan was a child with a father who gave her long generations of roots in America and a mother who “bequeathed Vietnam to her.” With different native tongues and separate codes of behavior, Harlan and Lan were bound to clash.  American confidence faced off against Vietnamese values, while mother and daughter struggled within a relationship that included Lan’s “shadow selves.”

Lan came to the U.S. as a child shaped by war, with parents whose past history outweighed the present and who could give her no guidance within the new life they all wrestled with. At home she was completely Vietnamese but once she walked out of her house, Lan carried the weight of becoming successful in America.

And she was. A graduate of Mount Holyoke, she went on to study law at Yale, to work at a Wall Street law firm, to achieve an academic career, and to become the author of two well-received novels. The American Dream was hers, although Lan points out this dream demands a crippling amount of work, work that her daughter would never have to face. “Americans can make their own dreams.”

As the only child of two law professors, Harlan lived a life that was idyllic in its affluence and rigorous in its training, with a notebook “full of fifth grade math that I had to do when I was just turning five.” She could “see sounds and feel letters and taste smells.” Words had colors and she was often accompanied by a purple cat that only she could see. Her best friend when she was at home was a little girl named Cecile. Cecile lived inside Harlan’s mother, a child with no body of her own.

This was one of Lan’s “shadow selves,” along with a horrifying creature that Harlan called “No Name.” These personalities emerged when Lan had seizures, in moments that nobody ever talked about and that Harlan first witnessed when she was four.. Like the purple cat and names that had their own unfading colors, this was a normal part of Harlan’s life. 

When Lan was four, she knew that her father carried cyanide pills in the hem of his military uniform. If he were captured, he would choose his own death. She grew up hearing stories of her uncle who attacked the enemy naked, at night. He and his comrades knew who to kill in the pitch darkness—any man who was wearing clothes.

But while Lan went from a life of war and struggle to one of success and comfort, Harlan’s successful childhood became a terrifying adolescence, when her father died and she became sexual prey to boys in her high school. Each of them convinced of the other’s invulnerability and perfection, Lan and Harlan became “two deaf best friends having one long conversation.”

Those conversations are made public in their two-person memoir that is scalding in its honesty and so piercing in its pain that it is difficult to read. But it ends with understanding and compassion. “I watched my mother’s heart bleed from the inside out,” Harlan concludes. As she looks toward a life of “perfect confusion, loneliness, deep  friendships, and loneliness,” she says “I’m ready.” “The stars were not aligned for us,” Lan says of her life with her daughter. “But forever here.”~Janet Brown

The Seed of Hope in the Heart by Teiichi Sato (Teiichi Sato)

“As long as I have the seed of hope in my heart, I can live anywhere. No matter what comes up, no matter how hard it gets along the way, we have to move forward for the future. For this reason, even if your hometown has been utterly destroyed by an unexpected tragic event, or something similar has happened to you, even if you have lost everything, have strong souls, look up at the sky, and move forward. Then, you really sow the seed of hope in your heart. Eventually, you can reap happiness…”

March 11, 2011, a date that will forever be etched in the Japanese psyche. At 2:46pm on Friday, an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.0 hit the Tohoku region of Japan, the most powerful quake to hit Japan and the fourth largest quake in the world. The quake caused a tsunami which wiped out many coastal towns and caused the accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.

Teiichi Sato is an ordinary man. He owns and runs a seed shop in Rikuzentakata City, a small town in Iwate Prefecture. He was a successful business one day and in one moment, he lost everything - his shop, his house, official documents and more. Sato gives a first-hand account of that fateful day. 

Sato states the purpose of The Seed of Hope in the Heart is “as a record of the tsunami for posterity, for the repose of the souls of the victims, to prepare for next disaster, as a survivor’s Bible, and as a small token of my gratitude for the kind support of from everyone, I have written this book while rebuilding my seed shop.”

This is the fifth and final edition to date of Sato’s self-published book which he decided to write entirely in English. Sato tells his story in English because he says, “If I wrote this Japanese, it would be too sad. I would be so emotional that my sentences would be ambiguous”. Sato tells us that by writing in English he could suppress his feelings and keep his mind busy by looking up the meanings of words he doesn’t know. 

He also wanted to write in English to tell his story to people overseas. He wanted to share his story about being a victim. He “wanted to talk about my experience of that awful tsunami”. It’s a harrowing account of one man’s experience of being a self-employed and fairly successful business with his own seed shop reduced to being a beggar. He was left with virtually nothing. 

But Sato’s story doesn’t stop there. He discusses what he did and what he accomplished on his long road to recovery from wanting to die and ending his life to starting over. He discusses the Kesendamashi or spirit of the Kesen people and how he overcame obstacles and government red-tape to re-open his store. The most amazing story is how Sato manages to re-open his shop in the tsunami-affected area a mere six months after the disaster. This is a story about the human spirit of survival .~Ernie Hoyt

What Could Be Saved by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz (Simon & Schuster, forthcoming, January 2021)

Cushioned by affluence in a city that they don’t understand, safe in Bangkok during the turbulence of the Vietnam War, the Preston family lives in a world of secrets and lies. The five of them rest securely in their comfort zones until the day the only son, a boy of eight, sinks below Bangkok’s surface in an inexplicable and unsolvable disappearance.

His parents and his two sisters return to Washington D.C. without him, back to the privileged lives that family wealth has provided, each one broken by Philip’s disappearance in ways none of them will acknowledge. The father dies, the mother embarks upon a journey toward dementia, her memories “swallowed, ingested, made null,” as thoroughly as her son had been. Bea, the oldest sister takes refuge in perfection. Laura, the youngest of the three children, escapes into a series of Ghost Paintings that have taken over her art. Then an email arrives. Forty-seven years after he vanished, Philip has resurfaced, the eight-year-old boy now a stranger in his fifties.

“It’s always a problem sending a man to a hot climate. You’ll never know what you’ll get back.” Words spoken to Philip’s mother by the man who will become her lover echo ominously when Laura gets on a plane to bring her brother home.

Written with slow and tender skill, a terrible story comes gradually into light, with secrets emerging like fragments of a jigsaw puzzle. “We were trained not to ask,” Bea says to her sister and a woman who had been their father’s colleague in espionage admits that in “our line of work...we don’t tell much. It’s part of the training.” “We’ve kept far too many secrets,” Laura replies, while left with a  whole new one all her own, one that’s “capable only of destruction, that needed to be kept.”

A photograph of a Vietnamese boy is used in propaganda that Philip’s father creates as a weapon of war, naively believing that misinformation passed on to Hanoi couldn’t endanger a boy in Thailand. Caught in their separate liaisons, neither parent remembers that Philip waits alone on a street that’s far beyond the expat bubble, a child who becomes prey in an act of revenge that’s every family’s nightmare. 

Floating in a river of darkness that’s eased by drugs, his body cared for only so it can be torn and hurt by nightly visitors, Philip becomes another person, divorced from his past. Once he’s too old to be valuable to his captors, he falls into yet another life, one that demands honesty and clarity, “like bits in a kaleidescope, falling randomly...into a new disorder and a new beauty,” one that has been denied to his sheltered sisters. 

O’Halloran Schwartz is a master of subtle horror, with an eye for beauty, a gift of gentle satire, and a disdain for subterfuge. In a time when readers most need hope, she extends it in a story that transcends a happy ending. When Philip concludes, “What’s happy? What’s an ending?” his words hold solace, not cynicism, in a novel that promises to be a literary highlight of 2021.~Janet Brown

Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

When his girlfriend gets a teaching job in the north of Thailand, author and fictional protagonist of Fieldwork, Mischa Berlinski, decides to tag along and make his living by writing freelance articles for various English language publications. Mischa was in Bangkok working on a story for a Singaporean arts magazine about an up-and-coming Thai sculptor. He meets his friend Josh O’Connor, who has been living in Thailand for the past ten years. 

Josh’s stories are so incredibly intriguing that Mischa always calls him when he is in Bangkok. Tonight would be no exception. They meet for food and drinks at an outdoor food booth that specializes in fish. During the meal, Josh tells Mischa he needs someone “who really knows the up-country” and begins to tell a typical Josh story.  

“A Josh O’Connor story is like a giant cruise ship leaving the port, and when you make a dinner date with Josh O’Connor, you know in advance that you are going to set sail”. Josh goes into his story about receiving a call from Wim, a functionary at the Dutch embassy who tells him about a woman who called and wants someone to inform her wayward niece that her uncle has died and has left her a small inheritance. The only thing is, the woman’s niece is in prison for murder.

Josh meets Martiya in prison but is met with an unexpected vehemence. Martiya believes Josh is just another missionary that wants her to accept the Lord Jesus. Once the misunderstanding is resolved, Josh informs her of her inheritance and asks if there is anything else he can do. Martiya is not interested in the money or bribing her way out of prison. The only things she asks for are pencils and papers so she can complete a paper she’s writing about life in a Thai prison. A simple request Josh grants her. The inheritance is to be given to charity to help and support the hill tribes of Thailand.

A year after talking with Martiya, Josh unexpectedly receives a package from the prison. Enclosed were two sets of manuscripts that Martiya wrote in prison with a request that they be properly typed and to submit them for publication. Josh calls the prison to talk to Martiya in person, only to be informed that she is dead. “She ate a ball of opium and killed herself”. Josh says it could be a great story, for someone who lives up North as he doesn’t have the time to pursue the story any further. What else could Mischa do but take up the story from there.

Berlinski weaves an interesting story that was inspired as he was writing a historical account of the conversion of the Lisu people of northern Thailand to Christianity. The Dyalo do not exist in real life but come to life in Fieldwork. Berlinski had interviewed a number of missionaries in Thailand which adds to the realism of Martiya’s encounters with them. The fictional Mischa takes up the story and does his research to find out more about Martiya van der Leun and how she ends up in prison. Who did she kill? Why did she kill the person? Why did she kill herself? The deeper Mischa delves into the story, the mystery slowly comes to light. 

If you weren’t interested in anthropology before reading Fieldwork, you may find yourself digging through other nonfiction titles related to the hundreds of tribes and people that you never knew existed! ~Ernie Hoyt

A Tiger's Heart: The Story of a Modern Chinese Woman by Aisling Juanjuan Shen (Soho Press)

Scarlet O’Hara meets The Ugly Ducking in this harrowing and unsparing memoir, a book so wrapped in desperation that it’s both difficult to read and impossible to abandon.

Born in a tiny village of fifty peasants, Juanjuan’s only hint of affection is the name her mother gives her, “Pretty.” But the little girl knows better. “She is just not lovable,” she overhears her mother saying. “I was simple, slow, and afraid of other people,” she describes herself. However Juanjuan is born at the right moment in history, in 1974. She turns six at a time when even a peasant girl can go to school and learn to find a refuge in books. “School was heaven, the only thing I enjoyed,” and she does well there, gaining a reputation for scholarship that even her dismissive parents are forced to acknowledge.

Juanjuan’s mother, beautiful and discontented, also finds that history has put her at an advantage. Deng Xiaoping has elevated businessmen from the villains of Mao’s time to the hopes of the nation and a village entrepreneur takes her as his mistress. His financial support helps Juanjuan to leave for the city of Suzhou where she has been accepted at a teacher’s college.

The only one of the 100 students in her village school to achieve this pinnacle, Juanjuan is smart enough to realize the path she’s been presented with has a dead end. Without money or influence, she’s sent to teach in a village even more dismal than the one she came from.  But she has a skill that opens windows for her. In college she learned English and she’s discovered that in that language, she’s no longer afraid. She follows a fleeting encounter with a foreigner that gives her a glimpse into another universe, the metropolis of Shanghai, and she becomes hungry for what this other world has to offer. Discovering  that sexual power can be a trap or an escape hatch,  Juanjuan chooses escape.

An affair with a handsome young teacher takes her to Guangzhou. An attraction to a factory manager leads her into a relationship with a man who mentors and fosters her advancement in the world of business. An infatuation with an Amway recruiter takes her back into poverty until her former mentor gives her a chance once again--and when she returns from the squalor of village life, Juanjuan knows how to get what she wants.

The only class she failed in college was a course in Moral Character and life has shown her that lacking this attribute is an advantage.  It’s the Roaring 90s when kickbacks are what smart people receive and “selling out your boss” is just good business. Juanjuan does all that--and then the Internet expands her dreams. 

Suddenly she’s sophisticated and successful, with an American boyfriend. Her affluence brings her closer to her mother and the secret of her unhappy childhood comes to light. Her boyfriend becomes her husband, Juanjuan becomes Aisling, and her acceptance to the University of Massachusetts becomes her graduation from Wellesley, magna cum laude.

As terrifying as it is inspirational, Juanjuan’s is a success story that is bloodcurdling and insightful. After reading this, who could resist a sequel to this odyssey, one  that tells how Juanjuan achieved her American success?~Janet Brown 

Gold Leaf and Terra-Cotta : Burmese Crafts throughout History by Ma Thanegi (ThingsAsian Press)

Myanmar is a country that was isolated from the world for a number of years. When Marco Polo first visited, he called it the “Kingdom of Mien” which is what the Chinese called it. Mien was derived from Myanmar whose name can be traced to a stone inscription found in Bagan and dated to be around 1235 AD. Then the British came and mispronounced the name of the majority tribe called the Bamar and called the country Burma. After the military junta took over, they changed the name back to Myanmar. There is still a lot of debate about which name should be the official name of the country. 

In this complicated country, Ma Thanegi was born. She has written numerous books on the culture and traditions of her native land. Gold Leaf and Terra-Cotta focuses on “Burmese crafts throughout history” but also gives the reader an easy to understand lesson in Myanmar’s history. As Myanmar is a mostly Buddhist country, many of the featured artifacts are related to the religion and its mythology. 

The founder of modern Buddhism, Guatama Buddha “warned disciples not to make graven images of him but to strive to achieve the highest and purest within their own hearts”. Five-hundred years later, his followers had either forgotten or ignored their master’s warnings and images of Buddha started to surface. Their need for “concrete symbols of faith have produced uncountable images and hundreds of thousands of pagodas and temples of all sizes”. 

“The first art in Myanmar, other than Stone Age cave paintings, were those with Buddhist themes on the temple walls of Bagan.” With those words, Ma Thanegi introduces us to Myanmar's fascinating history of arts and crafts. She also discusses the life of the royals, society in general, monasteries, Burmese spiritualism, and the feasts and festivals that are celebrated in her home country. Each chapter is followed by full color pictures of a variety of historical artifacts. 

In addition to images of Buddha, many of the art pieces are of celestial beings, spiritual beings called nats, ordinary items such as a hat box or betel box, book cabinets and a book trunk, puppets, mosaics and bas reliefs, all made with intricate designs. There are also a number of pictures of food caskets used for ceremonial purposes. One of the most interesting items is a pillow made of lacquered wood. 

I think one of the best ways to learn about a country’s history is through their art throughout the ages. It gives you an idea of their beliefs and customs and shows the greatness of the craftsmanship of bygone eras. The pieces are also wonderful to look at and appreciate. Ma Thanegi makes you want to visit her home country and discover Myanmar on your own. As the country had been closed for so many years that “many beliefs in old traditions and the appreciation for ancient crafts were both nicely preserved”. If we want to continue to see the traditional rural lifestyle, now would be the time to visit before the country gets inundated with Starbucks and McDonald’s! ~Ernie Hoyt

From A Nail through the Heart to Street Music: Thirteen Years of the Poke Rafferty Novels by Timothy Hallinan

“You can buy diaper?” This is an unlikely end to a series of detective novels that brought Poke Rafferty to life. An Irish-Filipino American travel writer, Rafferty emerged in Bangkok, “the world capital of instant gratification,” in A Nail through the Heart.  He’s a family man, happy with his beautiful soon-to-be wife Rose who was once the Queen of Patpong and his adopted daughter Miaow who spent her early years selling packs of gum on the city streets, a small girl who was fostered by a pack of feral children. 

Rose and Miaow are the core of Rafferty’s life, with its periphery buttressed by his friend Arthit, a policeman with an  expensive British education that’s left him with a highly developed sense of irony, and a motley collection of rapidly aging Western men who hang out at the Expat Bar, each of them what Rafferty “doesn’t want to be when he grows up.” Through a denizen of this bar, Rafferty becomes unwillingly involved in tracking down a missing Australian. This accidental detour from his contented domestic existence leads him into nine detective thrillers written over the span of thirteen years, and through worlds that would be the stuff of nightmares, were they not based upon reality.

Rafferty comes up against monsters immediately, ones that challenge readers to keep turning the pages. A dowager who once was one of the chief torturers in the Khmer Rouge prison of Tuol Sleng and who has lost none of her edge in old age and a man who does his best to destroy children in his thirst for pornography are as unforgettable as they are unspeakable. In the novels that follow Rafferty confronts a business empire based upon North Korean counterfeiters whose products range from fake medicines to nearly-perfect dollar bills, the byzantine labyrinths of Thai politics, a syndicate that exploits a vast army of beggars, Western mercenaries whose stock-in-trade is unbridled cruelty, and the involvement of Homeland Security in countries far from the United States.

Through Rafferty, Hallinan comes close to the bone in many of these novels, to the point that two of his underlying topics aren’t available through Google searches. The AT series that he refers to when discussing child pornograpy in an author’s note to A Nail Through the Heart doesn’t come up on Google and the Phoenix Program, the band of mercenaries who did the CIA’s dirtiest work during the Vietnam War and are introduced in The Fear Artist, appear only on Youtube clips and in Douglas Valentine’s book, The Phoenix Program, (which reputedly the CIA did its best to suppress and is now available only as an e-book). Hallinan’s third novel, Breathing Water, is a tutorial in modern-day Thai politics and the power of that country’s nouveau riche, and through all nine of his books runs the inescapable and highly lucrative connection between Thailand’s wealthiest men and the bargirls who draw thousands of men and their money to Bangkok and other Thai cities every year. 

Through the midst of the horror and the violence that Rafferty moves through, Rose and Miaow shine like beacons, bringing extraordinary life to what would otherwise be ordinary (although very well-written) thrillers. Eventually the two of them, especially Miaow, take over the hearts and minds of readers as thoroughly as they have Rafferty’s.

This series is launched with quips worthy of Raymond Chandler, all of them crisp and clever: a room “with the cosmetic appeal of a fever blister,” a drinker who rapidly “puts a pint of Singha into the past tense,” a woman of “40, clinging grimly to 28,” a man who looks as though he “watches colon surgery for laughs.” Cinematic descriptions of Bangkok--its weather, its street markets, its bar scene--are vivid and evocative. But what begins as classic noir deepens into something quite different.

Gradually a theme emerges with the panoply of daughters who shine through the darkness: Rose, whose father was on the verge of selling her into the flesh trade before she escaped into it on her own; Rafferty’s half-sister Ming Li who’s been carefully molded into a dangerous spy by their father; Treasure, a child with a monstrous father who is distorting her into his own image; and Miaow, the child who, Hallinan admits in his note to The Hot Countries, is the one he would choose if he could write about only one of his characters. As he ends the series with Street Music, he elaborates upon that. “Miaow, who on that very first page, was little more than a prop...became, for me, the heart of the series.” A child who was tethered to a bench and abandoned by her parents when she was four or five survives on the streets until she and Rafferty find each other three years later. Her character is fully formed by that time and as she gains the vocabulary, security, and confidence to express it, she takes center stage in the novels as confidently as she does on the stage of her elite school’s drama department. Through the prism of Miaow’s character, Hallinan finds depth and truth in other stories of the neglected and rejected figures of Thai society--the bargirls, the old sexpats, the ladyboys, and the street people--even the one who had abandoned her daughter by tying Miaow to that bench.

Hallinan leaves Rafferty where he found the man in the first place, with his family which has expanded to make Poke a floundering first-time father. Through the years, they’ve been through a lot together, author and character, guided by Bangkok residents like the curmudgeonly, kindly author Jerry Hopkins and are rumored to have become enshrined in a guidebook of their own, The Poke Rafferty Book by Everett Kaser (which is also untraceable online). In the legendary Patpong bar, the Madrid; in streets that are gentrified  and those that are slums; in the dubious street stalls of Bangkok’s Indian section and in the thinly disguised school for street children run in real life by Father Joe Maier in the slums of Klong Toei; in Bangkok’s answer to Central Park, the green and graceful oasis of Lumpini Park which at night is a sanctuary for those who have no other home--these are all places that Rafferty and Hallinan have made their own and have passed on to the rest of us. 

For thirteen years, readers around the world have looked forward to the next book in this series. Now that the last one is in bookstores, the only choice left for us is to go on our own and find Rafferty’s world in all of its grimness and glory. Bon voyage to us all.~Janet Brown