In Beautiful Disguises by Rajeev Balasubramanyam (Bloomsbury)

Fashion and beauty magazine Marie Claire describes Rajeev Balasubramanyam’s novel In Beautiful Disguises as “Holly Golightly meets Arudnhati Roy in an elegantly written novel about a girl who is desperate to escape from her life.” This is Balasubramanyam’s debut novel. The book was the winner of the Betty Trask Prize in 1999 even before it was published. 

The story is narrated by an unnamed sixteen year old girl living in South India. She begins her story by saying, “I was born a girl and remained so until I became a woman”. She was the youngest of the three children, having an elder sister and her much older brother, Ravi. Their father was an office clerk and their mother was a housewife and most of the time was treated like a domestic servant. 

The narrator had a passion for movies. She didn’t have any friends and spent most of her time at the local cinema called Majick Movie House. She came home one day and was informed that her sister was to be married. She was still fifteen and did not know how to react. 

She was seventeen when her sister had her first child. This was also the year when she saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s four times at the Majick Movie House. Holly Golightly became her role model. It was also the year she learned she was to be married. 

She meets the man she is to marry and doesn’t like him one bit. She didn’t like the tone of his voice, the look in his eyes, the way he was looking at her as “his look went way beyond visual autopsy”. It was also his six-year old sister, Savitri, pointing at something and asking, “What’s that thing?” The man could not hide his obvious erection. 

The father said the meeting was a success but the protagonist definitely did not want to marry the man. No, she was not going to marry the man, but if she didn’t, her father would be angry and would take out his anger on Ravi or her mother. For some reason, he has never hit her and she doesn’t know why. 

The narrator makes a life-changing decision. She decides to run away. She receives help from her sister’s husband’s grandfather who has found her a job in the City, a place she’s never been before. She was to start working as a maid for Mr. Aziz and his wife, Mrs. Marceau, a mean-spirited French woman who looks down on all the workers and Indians in general. She works for the couple for about a year and has many new life experiences. 

She meets a host of interesting characters at the house. Raju, a friend of her sister’s husband’s grandfather and the person that helps her settle into her new life. Ishaq, the person who was helping Raju in the kitchen. Manu, the driver. Arun, the gardener who often gets drunk after work and tries to take advantage of the younger women servants. She meets the other maids - Ambika, an old lady with a bad back who cleans the first floor and the kitchen and Maneka, one of the younger women who seems to be a bit promiscuous. Her job is to clean the top two floors of the house. And there is Armand, the son of Mr. Azia and Mrs. Marceau, who she begins to develop feelings for. 

This is a story of a girl who goes against traditions, defies her father’s wishes and sets out a new life in The City, where she gains new life experiences. However, she also comes to realize that she cannot go on living life as a fantasy, pretending that “she is a movie star in disguise as a maid”. She finally finds the courage to return home and to confront her greatest fear - her father. 

Balasubramanyam writes the story in such a way that you can’t help wanting the narrator to achieve her dreams of becoming the next Holly Golightly. Her actions may give other women in similar circumstances to question outdated traditions and to make their own life decisions no matter how difficult it may be. ~Ernie Hoyt

Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang (Doubleday)

 “My story starts decades before my birth.” Qian Julie Wang’s opening sentence immediately launches a searing memory that is not her own: the story of her father encountering his first dead bodies, corpses hanging from a tree,  when he was four years old. Three years later he witnessed the public beatings of his parents during the Cultural Revolution and faced daily humiliation himself at school, where he was singled out as a member of a “treasonous family.”

He grew up to be a professor of English literature, with a wife who was a professor of mathematics. They cherished their only child, and Wang’s father was a constant source of humor and delight to his little daughter. But he carried scars from nis childhood of brutality and fear. He left for America, Mei Guo, the Beautiful Country, with Wang and her mother following him there several years later.

“I ascended to adulthood at cruising altitude,” Wang says, when her mother became paralyzed with nausea and grief as soon as she got on the first plane to the States. It was Wang who lied to the stewardess that her mother’s seat belt was fastened and who held her mother upright as they changed from one plane to the next. In that journey, Wang at seven became her mother’s protector, a role her father was no longer able to assume. He had dwindled and had ““caved-in” during his time in America. His humor had dissolved into fearful caution. “Just remember this, Qian Qian; we are only safe with our own kind.”

When Wang starts school, her father leaves her with a warning, words for her to memorize and repeat, “ I was born here, I have always lived in America.” As an undocumented child of undocumented parents, this serves as her only guidance for twenty-two years. With both parents struggling to make a living, Wang is on her own in an unfamiliar universe, with only a smattering of a new language.

In her Brooklyn elementary school, ESL students are put in a special education classroom. Ignored, Wang turns to books, puzzling out words while using the English alphabet and phonics that her father had taught her in China, back in the days when he still had time for her. Slowly she progresses from Clifford the Big Red Dog to Dr. Seuss and begs her father to arrange for her return to the mainstream classroom that had rejected her months before. 

Wang continues to guard and protect her mother, joining her at her sweatshop job after school and becoming her confidant when the two of them are home alone. In turn her mother opens the world of New York to her, taking her to Fifth Avenue to view the holiday windows, bringing a strange old white American into the family who takes them on outings and introduces Wang to the joys of MacDonald’s Happy Meals. Slowly her mother’s confidence grows and blossoms into plans of going back to school and making enough money to hire an immigration lawyer, removing the family from poverty.

In the background, Wang’s father becomes frightening in sporadic episodes, directing his cruelty toward the cat that Wang has managed to bring into the household. “Bad luck,” he says, and when his wife goes into the hospital for surgery, the cat becomes the brunt of his anger. Even when Wang’s mother comes home and grows closer to realizing the ambitions she’s poured out to her daughter, her husband falls into darkness and renewed fear. When his wife divulges her plans, he slaps her in the face, hard enough to leave the mark of his hand unfaded for a long time afterward.

Through all of this violence, turmoil, and chaos, Wang learns, studies, and pushes herself. On her own, she passes the examination process to a school for gifted chidren in Manhattan, in spite of her father’s discouragement and the dismissiveness of the man who has been her teacher. When her mother graduates with a degree in computer science, Wang begins to believe that her own dream of going to Harvard and becoming a lawyer may come true.

“The thread of trauma was woven into every fiber of my family, my childhood,” she says, yet her childhood is heroic and ultimately triumphant. She tells her story without self-pity or drama, dedicating it “To all who live in the shadows: May you one day have no reason to fear the light.” Her memoir is one that should be read by every parent, teacher, and all  of us who hide behind our privilege, as an indictment and a wake-up call. Children are being overlooked and under-served in this country. Not all of them have the strength and the determination of Qian Julie Wang.~Janet Brown

The Sun in My Eyes : Two-Wheeling East by Josie Dew (Time Warner Books)

Josie Dew is first and foremost a touring cyclist from the U.K. She is also a professional cook and the author of a number of travel essays writing about her experiences cycling around the world. She says it was her elementary school teacher who inspired her to travel. “She told such wonderful stories about distant lands. I dreamed of visiting them one day”. It was after being involved in an auto accident in her childhood which put her off from being driven in anything with four wheels.

Dew rode around the country of Japan for the first time and wrote about it in her book A Ride in the Neon Sun : A Gaijin in Japan which was published in 1999. On her initial visit, she rode from Kawasaki in Kanagawa Prefecture all the way down to Kagoshima and Okinawa Prefectures in the south. 

The Sun in My Eyes is the story of Dew’s second cycling trip around Japan. She first finds herself in Hong Kong where even she admits, “For someone who has a strong affinity for wild empty places and a keen aversion to cars, I’m not quite sure just what I was doing immersing myself in a territory of only 1000 square kilometers with a population of 6.8 million people, most of whom were crammed into a feverishly paced forest of concrete, steel and glass.”

Dew first cycles around Hong Kong and its neighboring islands before finding a ship to take her to Japan. Once she reaches Okinawa, Dew’s Japan adventure begins and she spends time traveling to some of the smaller islands located nearby such as the World Heritage designated Yakushima and Tanegashima, the island known for introducing modern firearms to Japan in 1543. It is also the site of the Tanegashima Space Center, Japan’s largest space development center. 

Dew travels northward, first by riding around the island of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands. Her travels take her to Hiroshima and Miyajima, considered one of Japan’s three scenic spots. She marvels at the sand dunes in Tottori Prefecture; she checks out the through-leg viewing of Amanohashidate, another one of the three scenic spots of Japan.  

She makes a slight change of plans due to excessive rain along the coast and takes a ferry from the port town of Maizuru to Hokkaido. She travels along the coastal roads which takes her to Reibun Island, Japan’s northernmost island. She finds the time to do a bit of hiking in Shiretoko and mountain climbing in Rausu before cycling to Hakodate and catching a ferry to Oma in Aomori Prefecture. 

From Oma, Dew cycles down the Shimokita Peninsula and continues her way southward by going through the towns of Rokkasho, home to Japan’s largest nuclear waste dump; the town of Kessenuma, which was devastated by the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Her worries about, “What if the Big One hits” seems almost prophetic, although the earthquake happened more than ten years after her journey.

Dew doesn’t just cycle around the country, she also delves into the history of the cities and sites she visits. Being a woman on her own in a foreign country, she shares some of her humorous stories communicating with the locals. One of her most common language exchanges follows below.

“You are one person?”

“Yes, I am one person?”

“Really? One person?”

“Yes, really one person.”

“Ahh, that is great. You are one person from America?”

“No, England.”

“Ahh so, desu-ka. You are indeed two person?”

“No, I am one person. I am alone. One person from England.”

If you have never been to Japan or are planning to do so in the near future, with or without a bicycle, you will find Dew’s book very informative and entertaining. Her biting wit will make you laugh, her positive mental attitude will make you want to challenge yourself as well...maybe! ~Ernie Hoyt

Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok by Emma Larkin (Granta Books)

Comrade Aeon roams the streets of Bangkok, barefoot and ragged, searching for truth,  measuring and recording the world around him in “empirical data,” that can’t be contradicted or whitewashed. His life has been reduced to a kind of invisibility. Once a teacher of history, his insistence upon honest records has ruined his career, giving him a life of “walking his songlines” and resting in a shelter made of discarded billboards. His sole possession is his collection of notebooks, filled with his observed facts. 

When he was a young student rebel, he fled to Thailand’s jungle, the place where he was given a new name that reflected his passion for the past. Now he lives in a patch of jungle in the middle of Bangkok, a vacant lot filled with “verdant mesh...feeding off itself, growing out of its own decay.” Both this land and Comrade Aeon hold a buried secret, a part of Bangkok’s suppressed and laundered history.

Few people know Aeon but he is the link between vastly disparate residents of his city. A beautiful actress with whom he is obsessed is married to a real estate developer who sees Aeon’s jungle as the land that will increase the magnate’s fortune. An old woman who lives in the slum near Aeon’s refuge feeds him, gives him clean clothes, cuts his hair, and is troubled by odd dreams that are fragments of his secret. An expat wife, who feels an encroaching physical weightlessness calling her to her death, stumbles upon his hut one drunken night and gives Aeon another name, “the bonekeeper.” In her walk through the jungle she has seen bones protruding from the earth. They’ve been uncovered by the bulldozer that has begun the first stage of the developer’s project, bones that may belong to the man’s son who disappeared seventeen years before in a bloody political crackdown.

This could easily turn into the sort of soap opera that the beautiful actress has begun to write, the kind that serves as a Greek chorus, underpinning the plot of this novel. What saves it from stereotypes and banality is the beauty and the knowledge of Emma Larkin’s writing. She links the expat wife who haunts the jungle on her nightly expeditions, as “pale as a dead woman,”  to “another weightless woman,” the horrifying Thai ghost called Phi Krasue. She reveals the close relationship that exists between Bangkok business interests and the underworld, and shows how rumors and gossip easily gain strength and take the place of truth. She skewers the “hi-so” world of wealthy Bangkokians with a restaurant meal in which “essence of roasted beetroot” bleeds on a plate and acknowledges the beauty of the “balletic performance” given by the city’s nonstop traffic.

Her descriptions are precise and painterly, displaying the often overlooked beauty of Thailand’s capital city: “the soft pale lotus pink” of its morning light, its night sky of “watered indigo tinted with amber...never truly dark,” the “curious shimmering light” of its river, and the “densely knit constellation” that Bangkok becomes after sunset.

This debut novel has its flaws. Larkin’s knowledge of her characters threatens to sink them in voluminous backstory details. The length of more than a few of her sentences would make readers turn blue if they tried to voice them in a single breath. These are distractions that could have been avoided with some judicious trimming. Even so, her plot soars with its originality and her evident affection for her characters keeps them afloat and alive. Of all the novels that have been written in English about Bangkok and its people, its history and culture, this is by far the best.  No other writer has pierced the layers of Bangkok’s multileveled society with the insight and knowledge that this lifelong resident has brought to bear upon it. Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok is a literary guide that steers readers into the city’s heart without leading them astray.. ~Janet Brown

Five Spice Street by Can Xue (Yale University)

Five Spice Street is Chinese author Can Xue’s first full-length novel to be published in English. The story is told by an unnamed writer who also lives on Five Spice Street which is located in an unnamed city in China. The people of Five Spice Street, a three-mile long road, had always led ordinary lives until the mysterious Madame X moved into their community. 

The first mystery the people of Five Spice Street speculates about is the age of Madam X. The unnamed narrator says, “One person’s guess is as good as another’s. There are at least twenty-eight points of view. At one extreme, she’s about fifty, at the other, she’s twenty-two”. Everybody believes they have the right answer but nobody can prove nor disprove the validity of their answers and her age still remains a mystery. 

Madam X, along with her husband and son Little Bao, have moved to Five Spice Street and make a living selling peanuts. She does not realize how much her actions affect the people living on Five Spice Street. When a widow notices the coming and goings of a man named Mr. Q, the whole community speculates that they are having an affair and although Madam X and Mr. Q have not been caught in the act of “spare time recreation”, everybody has their own theory as to the truth of the matter. 

Madam X does not care what others think about her. She goes on about her daily life selling peanuts and looking into her microscope when she’s not working. Some people believe she’s a witch. Others think she is a fraud. The actions of the residents of Five Spice Street can be compared to a type of small town mentality where newcomers are viewed with suspicion and hostility. They may appear to be friendly on the surface, but once the newcomer is out of their sight, gossip and hearsay are the order of the day.

Even the community cannot agree on who initiated the affair. This affair becomes the core of the story. People have meetings about it. Some say, Madam X and Mr. Q’s actions are demoralizing the neighborhood and something should be done about it while others secretly wish they could be more like Madam X. 

Many critics have heaped praise on Can Xue’s work, citing her books as “avant-garde fiction”. I found her prose to be confusing with the story having no real plot. From the beginning of the book, the people of Five Spice Street seem to have nothing better to do than to gossip or denounce Madame X as a sorceress or witch and yet in the last chapter, they decide to elect her as the people’s representative. The narrative is confusing as the actions of the people. 

In an interview with author Can Xue, she says, “In very deep layers, all of my books are autobiographical.” To the people who try to find meaning in her stories, she had this to say. “If a reader feels that this book is unreadable, then it’s quite clear that he’s not one of my readers”. I have nothing personal against Can Xue, but I am definitely not one of her readers! ~Ernie Hoyt

A Tokyo Romance by Ian Buruma (Penguin Press)

“I never thought I could be Japanese, nor did I wish to be.” Ian Buruma, half Dutch, half English, has spent his life in Amsterdam and London, while feeling an outsider in both places. This, the man who becomes his friend and mentor when Buruma arrives in Tokyo to study film, is an asset. In Japan, Donald Ritchie tells him, a foreigner will always be a gaijin, “an outside person,” giving a  “freedom that is better than belonging.” In Japan, Ritchie says, “You can make yourself into anything you want to be.”

Tokyo dazzles the twenty-three-year-old Buruma with its visual density and its propensity for change. The city he enters has been rebuilt over and over again, starting with the Western modernization during the Meiji era, then after the earthquake of 1923, and following the destruction of American bombs in 1945. Now in the mid-70s, the city still holds the changes that came with the economic boom of the 1960s. A coffeehouse called Versailles is a faithful replica of an 18th-century French drawing room, filled with people smoking cigarettes and reading comic books. Old wooden houses and the cries of street vendors carry traces of the past. 

Within this “plastic-fantastic” city is an avant-garde culture that rivals any other of its time. A subculture of Tokyo artists were out to erase all externally-imposed ideas of proper behavior with creative work that is steeped in “the seedy, the obscene, the debauched, the bloody.” Araki, with his daring photographs, Mishima before he disembowled himself with a samurai sword, and the masters of Butoh made art that they called “dorukusai” or “stinking ot the earth.” Their work is shocking and invigorating and Buruma has credentials that allow him entrance to their world. He’s John Schlesinger’s nephew who came to town not long after his uncle’s tour de force, Midnight Cowboy, and Buruma himself is a passionate explorer of Japanese cinema, from yakuza gangster dramas to samurai epics to the gritty skin-flicks known as roman porno.

This leads him to an introduction to Kurosawa, the perfectionist and genius who once had a medieval castle built for a film at great expense, only to have it torn down and rebuilt because nails had been used in the original construction. Shortly before Buruma met him, Kurosawa had tried to kill himself with a razor because funding for his films had dried up, saying that apart from his movies, he didn’t exist.

But Butoh is what claims most of Buruma’s attention, the art of dance that’s based upon ancient Japanese theater and is translated in forms that are “erotic, grotesque, absurd,” with eerie and sometimes terrifying beauty. His encounter with the founder of Butoh ends when Hijikata dismisses him with  “You’re a television.” His next introduction results in his brief Butoh performance in which he disgraces himself by dropping one of the dancers. “So, Buruma,” a performer  observes, “you still believe in words.”

From there he ventures into the Situation Theater of Kara Juro, whose art is “as though Kabuki had been reinvented in a completely modern fashion,” a form of theater that’s political, improvisational, and wildly original. Buruma becomes the resident gaijin, with his interest in art and film--and in Kara, who fosters a form of gang culture that’s rough and sometimes violent.  When a domestic altercation between Kara and his wife flares into the woman’s head nearly being smashed in with a hurled ashtray of gigantic proportions, Buruma intervenes. “So you are just an ordinary gaijin after all,” Kara tells him afterward.

And Buruma admits he is, “hovering around the edges of an exclusive world, content to remain a stranger.” As an outsider, he observes, he takes notes, and he leaves for London where he will write his first book. It is, of course, about Japan. 

“Japan shaped me when the plaster was still wet,” he concludes, “Japan was the making of me.” How his romance with Tokyo led to his career as a writer is a story that he tells with honesty and insight. It’s one that should be read by any aspiring expatriate, whether they follow Buruma to Tokyo or go off to explore their own romance.~Janet Brown

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead)

And the Mountains Echoed is Khaled Hosseini’s third novel. He has written another epic novel focusing on his home country of Afghanistan and the bonds of family. The story spans over sixty years and starts in the small village of Shadbagh in 1952. Abdullah and Pari are brother and sister and they were always together. Pari was Abdullah’s junior by seven years. Their mother died while giving birth to Pari. The story opens with their father, Saboor, telling the children a story about Baba Ayub, a simple farmer who is forced to make a hard choice. He must choose to sacrifice one of his children to appease an evil entity called the Div. Hossein’s clever use of foreshadowing sets the tone for the rest of the story. 

Abdullah’s father, Saboor, remarried but he was always busy in the fields, his stepmother was busy taking care of her own children so Abdullah took it upon himself to be a father figure to Pari. In the fall of 1952, Abdullah’s father was taking Pari to Kabul. He often found feathers for his sister who kept them as a treasure in a box. The father told Abdullah he was to stay home and help his mother and Iqbal. Abdullah thought, “She’s your wife. My mother, we buried.” Abdullah’s father is resigned to the fact that his son is determined to come along and watch after his sister. Little does Abdullah know that this would be the last time he would see his sister. 

We are then introduced to Uncle Nabi. Nabi is Saboor’s wife’s brother. It is Uncle Nabi who sets the entire story in motion. He works as a driver for a wealthy couple, the Wahdatis, who live in Kabul. He has also found a job for Saboor in the city. Abdullah doesn’t understand why his father sets out for the city in a wagon when he could have Uncle Nabi come pick him up in his employer’s car. He also doesn’t know why Father is taking Pari with him as she’s too young to be of any help. 

Uncle Nabi doesn’t just find a job for Saboor, it is he who makes the suggestion and arranges the “sale” of Pari to the wealthy couple. However, his motives are not really in the financial interests of his sister’s husband. He can see that the marriage is one of convenience and although Mrs. Wadahti is very sociable, her main desire is to have a child of her own. 

Uncle Nabi is in love with his employer’s wife and believes that if he grants her this one wish, she will think of him as more than just her husband’s chauffeur. Unfortunately for Uncle Nabi, once Pari becomes part of the household, Mrs. Nabi’s universe is centered around Pari. Soon afterward, Mrs Nabi leaves her husband and takes Pari to live with her in Paris. 

The story continues to follow the two main characters. Pari grows up knowing almost nothing about her past before the Wadahtis but always feels that there is something missing in her life. Something or someone important. Abdullah grows old but holds on to a yellow feather which is a reminder to him that he once had a sister. 

The actions of each character make you ponder what would you do if you were in their shoes. The poverty stricken father who makes the decision to “sell” his daughter. The uncle who suggests in the first place to gain the love of his employer’s wife. The complex familial relationships will keep you glued to the end to see if the two siblings are ever reunited. ~Ernie Hoyt

Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America by Mark Padoongpatt (University of California Press)

Thai food has become a staple for American eaters, with Thai restaurants found in the most unlikely places throughout the U.S. Even more surprising are the number of Thai temples in America, but as Mark Padoongpatt points out, food and Buddhism are tied together in Thai culture. Thai immigrants want the guidance and community found in their temples but “Thai people must have Thai food.” 

With the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 which replaced the draconian Exclusion Act, young Thai students came to attend U.S. universities. Soldiers who served in the Vietnam War came home with Thai wives who gained entry under the War Brides Act.  (By 1980, 40% of Thai women in America were the wives of veterans.) 

Los Angeles became a popular destination for Thai imigrants, who rapidly found that the food of that city wasn’t what they wanted to eat every day. Worse yet, they were unable to find the ingredients that are the crucial underpinning of Thai food. 

American women who had lived in Bangkok came home with recipes that they gathered into truly blood-curdling cookbooks, with dishes that substituted sour cream for coconut cream, anchovy paste for fish sauce,  and cayenne pepper for Thai chile. Thai people found a better solution, although a risky one. They smuggled ingredients back to the U.S. in their luggage, ones that were often confiscated by customs officials. The result of this culinary deprivation meant that by 1971, there was only one Thai restaurant in Los Angeles, and no Thai or Southeast Asian grocery store, until Pramote Tilakamonkul opened the Bangkok Market.

Realizing the precarious nature of smuggling food, whether in a suitcase or a container vessel,  Tilakamonkul turned to Mexico and its Free Trade Zones, along with its climate that fostered the cultivation of Thai ingredients, grown from Thai seeds. The Bangkok Market flourished and attracted Thai small businesses to its neighborhood, including a large number of Thai restaurants.

This coincided with America’s love of dining out, which went from being a special occasion to its transformation into a regular event in the ‘70s and ‘80’s. Once it was discovered by food writers, Thai cuisine became a sensation with its distinctive, sophisticated flavors and its healthful dishes. Thai restaurant owners brought Thai art and artifacts to set their businesses apart from those of other Asians and brought the civility of Thai culture into the front of the house, while employing young and attractive waitstaff who were predominately female. As the owner of an upscale Thai restaurant said, “Whether we like it or not, we represent Thailand culturally.”

When the first official Thai Buddhist temple, Wat Thai, was opened in 1979, its suburban neighbors were surprised at how jovial and social an entity it turned out to be. Thai people from all over the region came to participate in everything a Thai temple offers, including the traditional temple fairs which in America became frequent food festivals. The food sold at the fairs was cooked for Thai tastes, not adapted to American palates, and it became wildly popular with all residents of Los Angeles. Neighborhood parking was soon a contentious issue, as was littering and live music sent out from loudspeakers. This wasn’t the quiet and deferential mood that diners found in Thai restaurants and the neighborhood rebelled, with the result that the festivals no longer took place once a week. Instead that facet of Thai culture found a more congenial spot, in the area near the Bangkok Market, which has been given the official title of Thai Town.

Second-generation Thai American Mark Padoongpatt posits that Thai Americans are constrained and stereotyped by the American Empire’s placement of them as purveyors of food, “privileging Thai cuisine over Thai people.”  He points out the cultural appropriation practiced by David Thompson, whose encyclopedic volume, Thai Food, collected recipes from aristocratic Bangkok sources and launched Thompson’s mini-empire of Thai restaurants, and by Andy Ricker, who did the same thing with Northern Thai food and spread his chain of Pok Pok restaurants from the Pacific Northwest to New York City. He excoriates the bamboo ceiling that has driven Thai Americans into making their fortunes in kitchens and the naivete of Americans who take the image constructed by those restaurateurs and apply it to every Thai person they meet. He blames the adaption of Thai food into a bland and sweet bastardization upon the culinary colonization that the American palate has forced on an unfamiliar cuisine. His argument is passionate and wide-ranging, raising issues that have been ignored for much too long~Janet Brown

Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller (Viking)

Nora Okja Keller is a Korean-American writer and Comfort Woman is her first novel. It was the winner of the American Book Award in 1998. The term “comfort woman” is a term used for women and girls who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Army of Japan during World War 2. It remains a sensitive subject between the nations of Japan and South Korea. However, the author doesn’t focus on the conflict between the countries.

Comfort Woman is the story of a woman and her daughter, Akiko and Beccah and is narrated throughout, by the two women who currently live together in Hawaii.  The story opens with the line, “On the fifth anniversary of my father’s death, my mother confessed to his murder.” Beccah’s father died when she was five years old.  Beccah doesn’t recall how she felt about her mother when she was told that it was her who killed her father. “Maybe anger, or fear. Not because I believed she killed him, but because I thought she was slipping into one of her trances.” 

Beccah realized at a young age that there was something different about her mother. Most of the time, she was like any other mother. She would laugh and sing songs with her daughter. She would tell Beccah stories about her father when he was in Korea. It didn’t matter how hard Beccah prayed or left offerings to the gods, her Aunt Reno (not a blood relative) would say “the spirits claimed your mother”. 

It was during these times that Beccah felt she could not understand her mother. When the spirits called to her, Beccah felt, “My mother would leave me and slip inside herself, to somewhere I could not and did not want to follow. It was as if my mother turned off, checked out, and someone else came to rent the space.”

Akiko starts off her narrative with “The baby I could keep came when I was already dead.” She says she was twelve when she was murdered, fourteen when she died. Even twenty years after leaving one of the “recreation camps”, Akiko was able to have a baby. A half-white, half-Korean girl who would be called a tweggi in her home village, but here where she was born, “she was American”. 

Akiko was saved by missionaries. They had assumed she was Japanese because of her name as it was sewn onto “the sack that was my dress”. “The number, 41, they weren’t sure about.” She could hear them talk amongst themselves saying she is “like the wild child raised by tigers”. Akiko responded to the simple commands they gave in Japanese -sit, eat, sleep. She said she would have responded to “close mouth” and “open legs” as well. In the camps where women like her were called Jungun Iyanfu, military comfort women, they were taught “whatever was necessary to service the soldier.” They were not “expected to understand, and were forbidden to speak any language at all.” 

When Beccah’s father died, they were living in Miami. Beccah’s mother sold whatever assets he had and tried to make their way to Korea but only got as far as Hawaii. It wouldn’t be until after Beccah’s mother's death that Beccah would learn the truth about her mother’s past. 

Can you imagine not knowing anything about your mother, the person who gave you life? Can you imagine not knowing what their real names were, thinking that the name you had been calling them all your life was a lie? 

The ordeal that the “comfort woman” had to go through boggles the imagination. Nora Okja Keller once again sheds light on a piece of history that Japan would like to forget and refuses to apologize for. Keller does not focus on the politics of the situation but weaves a story that could ring true for a number of women who were forced into sexual slavery. ~Ernie Hoyt