Ayo Gorkhali by Tim I. Gurung (Blacksmith Books)

There is no such word as Gurkha in Nepal. A corruption of Ghorka, coined by the British, it would never have come into existence were it not for England’s Great Game and the British East India Company’s desire to control trade routes into Tibet. The barrier to this goal was the Gorkhali Army of the powerful kingdom of Gorkha, a state that had conquered Sikkim, ruled over much of what is now Nepal, and controlled almost all of India’s northern regions.  

In the first battle between these two forces, 2,400 British soldiers were defeated by 1,400 Gorkhas. Over half of the British troops were killed by soldiers crying “Ayo Gorkhali” (“The Gorkhas are upon you!”), and brandishing their fearsome knives, the khukuri, (corrupted into kukri), with the aid of villagers who came armed with bows and arrows, nettles, and active hornet nests.  It took almost fifty years and an army of 50,000 for the British to finally defeat 14,000 Ghorka soldiers. 

Being no fools, the British Army was eager to bring fighters of this caliber into its ranks, “which took the sting out of the Gorkhali Army and made Nepal “a toothless tiger.” From that time on, “the youth and able men” of that country were served up to Great Britain, depleting the power of Nepal on many levels. 

From the Sepoy Mutiny up through both World Wars and beyond, the Gorkhali became the legendary Gurkhas, brave, fierce, and, to the British, expendable. They led the other soldiers into battle, after being given lashings of rum by their commanders to boost their courage, and, with their kukris, were the ones sent to “clear the ground at the end” in hand-to-hand combat. Many among what was popularly known as the “Gurkha Legion” received Victoria Crosses for bravery, but when they were forced to retire at the age of 35, they were sent back to Nepal without military pensions, regardless of the injuries and honors they carried with them. 

“Each little Gurk might be worth his weight in gold,” General Ian Hamilton said during World War One, but his assessment wasn’t reflected in the way the Gurkhas were paid. Even in the 1960s, when the Gurkhas were stationed in Hong Kong, they received $42 dollars a month compared to the $450 paid to their British counterparts. They were cheap, dispensable, and handicapped by the virtues instilled in them by their culture. The Gurkhas were taught from birth that honor, respect, and loyalty were essential; their motto was “Better to die than be a coward.” And die they did. Over 60,000 Gurkhas were killed, wounded, or listed among the missing in action during the two World Wars.

The ones who were wounded placed a terrible burden upon the country of Nepal, both on social and economic grounds. Men who had been given two choices in life, to farm or to fight, came back to the farms broken by war. Gone by the age of 18, back at 35, generations of Gorkhali men became burdens, uncompensated in any way by the country that had exploited them.

It wasn’t until 1969 that private funds established the Gurkha Welfare Trust “to alleviate poverty and distress among Gurkha veterans and their families,” 154 years after the Gurkhas had been made part of the British Army. And only in 2009 did Great Britain allow the Gurkhas “right of abode.” Slowly and grudgingly the “debt of honor” owed to the Gurkhas is being repaid to a people who were “betrayed by their destiny.”

A former Gurkha himself, Gorkhali Tim Gurung presents an almost dauntingly detailed military history, a full and truthful picture that rewards persistent readers, leaving them to echo  his last words on the subject, “Jai Gurkhas!”~Janet Brown

Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui (Pocket Books)

Wei Hui’s novel Shanghai Baby was first published in China in 1999 and was subsequently banned by the Chinese government for being too decadent. The English language edition, translated by Bruce Humes, was published in 2001 and received a lot of positive reviews. 

It is the semi-autobiographical story of the author. The main character is a twenty-five year Shanhainese woman named Nikki. Her friends call her Coco, after Coco Chanel, who she considers to be her idol, after Henry Miller. Nikki had found a bit of success after publishing a book of short stories titled The Shriek of the Butterflies. She has recently quit her job as a magazine journalist and now thinks of herself as a “bare-legged, miniskirted waitress at a joint  called the Green Stalk Cafe.”  She is also trying to write her first novel.

She meets Tian Tian at the cafe and the two start a serious relationship. Nikki soon leaves her parents home to live with Tian Tian, who is an extremely shy but very talented artist. He was raised by his grandmother after his father died, while his mother married a foreigner and moved to Spain. Tian Tian no longer speaks to his mother as he still believes she and her Spanish husband were responsible for the death of his father. His hatred of his mother and other problems makes him impotent so he cannot have normal sexual relations with his girlfriend. 

Nikki is a young woman who loves Tian Tian but desires to be fulfilled sexually as well. When she meets a tall and handsome foreigner from Germany, she has an affair with him, knowing that he has a wife and children. While Mark, the foreigner, who knows Nikki lives with her boyfriend, only seems to want her to satisfy his carnal pleasures.

Although Nikki keeps her affair secret from Tian Tian, he realizes something is wrong and decides to leave for the south of China for an extended time. This leads to his drug use as he becomes further and further removed from life’s reality. Nikki goes to see Tian Tian to bring him back to Shanghai to go to a detox center but she continues to see Mark as well. She feels guilty but feels no remorse when having sex with Mark.

The supporting characters who are Nikki’s friends and acquaintances are as shallow and selfish as Nikki. The reader may find it hard to empathize with any of the characters as they all seem to be two-dimensional beings, thinking only of themselves and their happiness. 

Although the story is well-written and fast-paced and keeps you interested to see how things turn out, I found the main character to be selfish, self-absorbed and a bit narcissistic as well. It was difficult to relate to the problems NIkki and her friends mostly bring on themselves. They don’t seem to know who they are or what they want out of life. Fortunately, this is just a fictitious account of contemporary Shanghai but If this is the new generation of hipsters in China, I fear for their country. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd (Perennial Classics, HarperCollins, Publishers)

“I have heard that people change east of Suez and that could be what is happening to me,” Mary MacKenzie writes in a notebook days after turning twenty-one. The sheltered daughter of a severe Presbyterian mother, she is on a voyage to China, in 1903, en route to marry a young diplomat whom she barely knows. As she travels further from Scotland, she’s startled to find she’s developed a taste for curry and has stopped wearing her corset. “It’s almost frightening,” she tells herself, “that you can travel on a ship and feel yourself changing,” an observation she knows she can never write to her mother.

By the time she reaches her fiancé in Beijing, Mary has discovered her own mind and isn’t reluctant to speak it—or write it in a series of private notebooks. Bored by her handsome husband and her new baby, within a year of her arrival she embarks upon an affair with a Japanese military officer, becomes pregnant with his child, and is banished from her house, her husband, and her daughter. Under the intricate and omniscient protection of her aristocratic lover, Mary is taken to Tokyo and placed in a comfortable house of her own, where she gives birth to a son.

An event that is still shocking even in this century separates Mary from her baby and his father but she’s determined to remain in Japan with hopes that she may someday see her son again. For the next thirty-six years, she manages to make a life for herself in Tokyo, through years of sweeping social transformation and several wars. On the periphery of her life is the man who brought her to his country, with whom she has a bond that goes beyond the physical. He is the only person who may someday reunite her with her lost son.

This would be an ordinary historical romance, were it not for the history told through the lively voice of Mary’s candid letters and journals. Oswald Wynd gives intimate descriptions to life in Tokyo that indicate a deep knowledge and experience of that subject. The Ginger Tree takes on a surprising depth of detail as soon as Mary arrives in Japan. From her “pretty little house” which is “really not a house at all but a flimsy box around a game played to quite simple rules,” to the varying degrees of comfort ranging from no chairs to the recent invention of electric lights imported by German interests, Mary’s new life is made up of hundreds of curiosities. She’s  wakened at night by the sound of the night watchman’s wooden clappers and his cries that all is well and learns to appreciate eight-hour performances of Kabuki in which an actor prepares to disembowel himself while members of the audience hiccup from too much rice wine. She shops in the Ginza where rich women buy European imports in a four-storey department store and becomes friends with a Japanese Baroness who was imprisoned for staring at the Emperor Meiji. She describes the night sky brightened to blood-red by neighborhood fires that can destroy six thousand houses in one night and recreates the sounds that punctuate her domestic life, “the hootings of small steamers and tugboats,” “the great bronze bell at the Hongwanji temple,” the mournful music played on a neighbor’s samisen. She gives a startling first-person account of the beauty and terror of a tsunami and a detailed look at the Emperor Meiji’s funeral procession. 

At a certain point, the question of how did Wynd know so much about his character’s Japanese life demands an answer, one that is as compelling as the novel he has written. Born in Tokyo to Scottish missionary parents in 1913, Wynd was given Japanese citizenship at birth. Japan was his home until he was in his teens (when his parents moved him to Atlantic City where he went to high school—a kind of culture shock that’s unimaginable) and he spoke fluent and faultless Japanese. 

After moving back to Scotland just in time for the start of the Second World War, Wynd became part of the British Army’s Intelligence Corps, no doubt because of his command of Japanese. He was captured by Japanese troops and under interrogation by their secret police, admitted his dual nationality. For what was perceived as a betrayal of his birthplace, he was threatened with execution but instead served as an interpreter while imprisoned in Hokkaido. Here “he was baffled by the Japanese treatment of prisoners,” the Independent reports with true British understatement. When he was released at the end of the war, he swore never to return to Japan nor to “recognize his erstwhile ‘fellow countrymen’ in civilian life.”

Using the pen name of Gavin Black, Wynd wrote fifteen thrillers and seven novels under his own name. Two of them were about women in Japan—The Ginger Tree with its remarkably feminine point of view and his first novel, The Black Fountains, which tells the story of a young Japanese girl who returns to Japan after being educated in the U.S., just before the outbreak of World War II, an opposite mirror image of Wynd’s own experience.

He died in Scotland at the age of 85, with twenty-three years of his life spent in Asia and three and a half of those within a prison camp. It’s extraordinary that his bitterness and anger toward his birthplace only surface at the very end of The Ginger Tree, when Mary, facing repatriation at the beginning of World War II says she will only return to Japan “when Tokyo and Yokohama lie in ruins.” Even then Wynd’s attachment to Japan and the Japanese is made stunningly clear in his concluding paragraph, which is a masterpiece of subtlety and heartbreak.~Janet Brown

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (Vintage Books)

The Memory Police is a science fiction story written by Yoko Ogawa, author of The Housekeeper and the Professor and The Diving Pool. It was originally published as 密やかな結晶 (Hisoyaka na Kessho) in Japanese in 1994 and was first published in English in 2019 and was translated by Stephen Snyder.

Set on an unnamed island, everyday items are slowly disappearing. The story opens with the narrator who “wonders what was disappeared first”. Her mother had told her there were many things in the past, before her daughter was born. “Wonderful things you can’t possibly imagine.”

Her mother kept some of these things in a secret drawer and would encourage her daughter to open one and would tell her about the different objects she held in her hands. One day it may be a kind of fabric called a “ribbon” that people used to tie up their hair. This object “was disappeared” from the island when her mother was seven. Another was called a “bell” that if you shook would make a lovely sound. “Stamps” had also “been disappeared” from the island. Her mother explained it was something you used to send a letter to someone. 

No one knows why these things disappeared and everyone accepted it as a part of life on the island. People will wake up the next day and know that something has changed but with the disappearance of any items, the memory of the items disappears from the people’s thoughts as well. However, there were some people who didn’t forget. Some families tried to run away. 

The Inuis were the narrator’s neighbors. They came to the house late at night as they wanted to escape the Memory Police. They were also friends with the narrator’s mother. To repay the kindness of letting them stay one night at the house, the Inuis gave back three sculptures that the narrator’s mother had gifted to them many years ago. 

The narrator’s parents both died and she had been living alone in their house for the past two years. She works as a novelist and her only friends include her editor R and an old man who lives on an abandoned ferry who was a family friend. Life continued as normally as possible with the exceptions of more and more things disappearing. 

It is the job of The Memory Police to enforce the disappearances of objects and who also sought out people whose memories survived. Nobody knows what became of them but they were never to be seen in town again. The narrator began to worry about what would happen if words or books were to disappear. 

The narrator learned that her editor, “R” was one of those people who did not lose their memories. She decided she wanted to help hide him from the Memory Police. With the help of the old man, they built a secret room inside the house. The narrator told her editor that he would have to leave everything behind and leave without notice so the Memory Police wouldn’t suspect a thing. 

Things continued to disappear but most of the people were so used to the losses that they didn’t give a thought to the things that were gone. Then an earthquake struck. In the disaster the narrator’s mother’s sculptures were broken and she noticed there was something hidden inside. She showed them to her editor who told her that they were things “that were disappeared” long ago - a ferry ticket, a harmonica, and some candy called ramune. 

As the narrator predicted, books “were disappeared” but her editor encouraged her to continue writing and to hold on to the things her mother kept hidden, always telling her that he believes “they have the power to change you, to alter your hearts and minds. The slightest sensation can have an effect, can help you remember. These things will restore your memory.”

But will it affect the narrator? Will more things disappear. What will happen to the Memory Police when there is nothing left to remember? This is a most unusual story and is very reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 but Ogawa writes with a voice of her own. What would you do to preserve your memories? ~Ernie Hoyt

Drawing on the Inside: Kowloon Walled City 1985 by Fiona Hawthorne (Blacksmith Books)

Fiona Hawthorne came to Hong Kong in the 70s when she was six. For the next eight years of her life, she roamed through the city with a freedom that finally alarmed her parents. Exploring Kowloon’s street markets was one thing but drinking San Miguel in Wanchai’s bars and coming home late at night in a taxi wasn’t the sort of adventure they wanted their daughter to have at fourteen. They took their family back to Ireland but it was too late. Fiona had Hong Kong in her blood and at twenty-two, she came back as a young artist.

Now she had the ability to satisfy a longing that had gone denied when she was a free-ranging girl. On childhood visits to her favorite market, the one so close to the Kai Tak airport that jets screamed above the heads of shoppers, almost parting their hair, she had seen a spot nearby that was forbidden territory. Naturally that appealed to Fiona.

The Kowloon Walled City had been a separate entity since the days of the British takeover. Initially left out of the original treaty that claimed Hong Kong, when it was included in the following year, it continued to exist on its own terms, under its own rules. In the 70s, it was flooded with mainland Chinese who spawned an explosion of cheap housing blocks, built without inside plumbing or elevators. Rumors that the place was run by triads and was riddled with crime made it a “no-go” area for the rest of Hong Kong. To Fiona, this community of 60,000, supported by mom and pop industries, was irresistible, “a patchwork of chaos with a strange and compelling beauty.” She was determined to go inside but she needed an introduction that would serve as her passport.

One of her old classmates had a friend who worked with drug addicts within the Walled City, a woman who approved of Fiona’s plan to explore and paint the life and surroundings of this private world. Accompanied by a former addict, Fiona spent three months there, carrying her watercolors, stacks of cheap cardboard that ordinarily formed a base for mahjong tiles, and two heavy cameras for photos and videos. The residents of the Walled City spoke Mandarin, which Fiona hadn’t mastered, but in a mixture of Cantonese and English, she managed to communicate with the people she met.  As she sketched and painted, she openly showed her work to her subjects and they encouraged her to continue. She was accepted.

Fiona was immediately frustrated by the “image of notoriety” that stigmatized the Walled City. What she found there was a place filled with hardworking people who spent their days making food, plastic flowers, shoes, clothing, in small dark spaces. She painted the dark, impenetrable wall of buildings that characterized the City, but she also showed the shafts of light that passed through the slivers of space between them and brightened a wealth of color within. Flowers bloomed on caged-in balconies and vegetable gardens flourished in vacant bits of ground. 

Her art reveal no traces of menace. Watercolor portraits show faces turned toward her in trust and her quick sketches capture moments of deep tenderness. A young couple gaze at each other, lost in love. A man and woman sit with their infant, pouring all of their attention upon the baby. Within the dark and narrow alleyways between buildings, children play and adults sit together, chatting. Fiona’s drawings, paintings, and photos show a community that’s strikingly similar to ones that still exist in Kowloon, its streets filled with traffic and pedestrians, a forest of signs looming above them; small crowded spaces where workers take a break to eat together, sharing dishes made by a shirtless man who cooks over open flames; false teeth arranged in a macabre shop window display.

When Fiona steps away from this bustling world to show its exterior, it’s a view that can easily bring on a feeling of seasickness. The buildings are jammed together, tilting against each other for support, teetering as if they’re drunk. At night, they take on a comforting look, with hundreds of windows beaming light into the darkness, each one a spot of domestic privacy.

Fiona herself appears only twice. On the book’s unjacketed cover, she shoots a video, youthful, slender, and intent upon what she’s recording. At the end of the book there she is again shrouded in darkness, her face hidden behind her massive camera and her mane of hair blazing in an errant beam of light. Less than ten years afterward, the Walled City was demolished, its space transformed into a city park. “I had no idea that I was recording a place that would someday be gone,” she says, but through her eyes and her art, that community is truthfully and skillfully memorialized.~Janet Brown

Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda (Harper)

Canadian author Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s debut novel Secret Daughter is the story of two women who live worlds apart but have an unseen bond that will affect both of their lives. 

Somer has everything she could want in life - a good marriage, a nice and caring husband who is also a doctor. His name is Krishnan and he is originally from India. She also has a great career as a physician in San Francisco. However, the only thing that eludes her is the ability to bear any children of her own. 

In the same year, across the globe, in a rural town in India, Kavita gave birth to her second daughter. Her first one was taken soon after it was born and was never seen or heard from again. Kavita refuses to give up her second child without a fight and in order to save her life, she makes the decision to give her up for adoption.

Asha is an Indian child adopted from an orphanage in Mumbai. It is this girl that connects the two women who do not have anything in common. We follow the lives of both families over a span of more than twenty years. It is Asha’s search for her own identity that leads her to India to find a part of herself that she feels has been missing. 

One of Somer’s wishes is to be a mother. She’s had one previous miscarriage so she knows the symptoms. Her husband has taken her to the hospital and she has woken up to see an IV stand next to her bed. The next thing she hears is a doctor telling her “she’s clean”. This upsets her more than the doctors, nurses, or her husband can imagine. She feels “they just see her as a patient to be doctored, a piece of human equipment to be repaired. Just another body to be cleaned up.”

In a small town called Dahanu in India, Kavita feels as strongly about saving her daughter. She knows her husband and his family are all disappointed in her giving birth to another girl. The first one was taken away quickly so Kavita vowed that the same fate would not await her second child. With the help of her sister and a vast amount of courage, she and her sister walk from Dahanu to an orphanage in Bombay. Kavita names her daughter Usha. “Usha is Kavita’s choice alone. A secret name for her secret daughter.”

As we follow the lives of both families, we see Asha growing up and the older she gets, the more curious she becomes about her biological parents. This issue puts a strain on the relationship between her and her mother. They drift even further apart when Asha wins a scholarship and tells her mother she will be staying in India for a year to work on a project about children living in poverty. Her daughter’s decision not only affects their relationship but it also affects Somer’s relationship with her husband. 

I imagine many adoptees go through a crisis of identity at one time or another. Especially if they have been adopted from a third world country and brought up in the U.S., Australia, or the U.K. They grow up to find that they look nothing like their parents and begin to question who they are and where they are really from. However, most people do not give thought to the adoptee’s parents and how the children’s actions will affect them as well. In this emotional roller-coaster of a story, one learns about the power of love and the true meaning of family. ~Ernie Hoyt

Clash of Honour by Robert Mendelsohn (Prion)

Clash of Honour is Robert Mendelsohn’s debut novel and was first published in 1989. The story will take you to Thailand, Singapore, Burma, Spain and Japan. It centers on the theme honor, deceit, betrayal, loyalty and obligation. It is mostly a story of revenge and how far a person will go to achieve their aims without giving thought to the consequences of their actions.

The story opens in Bangkok, Thailand in December of 1975. A young English woman, the daughter of a British soldier and a Spanish mother, has come to the country and is heading Bang Saray, the place where her father died. 

Anna Bellingham is the daughter of Lt. Derek Pritchard, a soldier who was captured by the Japanese Imperial Army after the fall of Singapore. She is determined to find a man named Yoshiro Katsumata in the hopes of leading her to his father, Lt. Keichi Katsumata,the man she believes was responsible for her father’s death.

Yoshiro Katsumata is a businessman climbing his way to the top of Sato Kaisha where he works. He may become the first outsider to head the family-owned company. He has no idea that a foreign woman would come looking for him to seek revenge for her father.

After the fall of Singapore in 1942, Lt. Derek Pritchard and an Englishman colonel, Dr. James Hedges became Prisoners of War. However, they were not sent to a P.O.W. camp. The two soldiers became a pawn in a secret mission for the Japanese government. 

As the story progresses, the reader begins to question what really happened between Pritchard, Hedges, and Katsumata. Of the three, it is only Pritchard who died in the war. Anna and Yoshiro are told the stories of their fathers by surviving members of the ordeal. 

Hedges was friends with the Pritchard family. As he was present in Bang Saray, Pritchard’s wife insisted on knowing the circumstances of her husband’s death. Listening to the evils committed upon the one she loves, she instills in her daughter the venom and hate against the Japanese and especially against Lt. Keichi Katsumata.

Yoshiro hears the story of his father from his father’s commanding officer. It is after Anna meets him and is seduced by her that he finds out the truth about her. He feels obligated to ask Pritchard’s family for forgiveness and believes it is his duty as a Japanese son to bear the responsibility of his father to retain the honor of the family name.

It isn’t until the very end where the reader learns the truth surrounding Lt. Derek Pritchard’s death and the motives of those involved. In this story the sins of the father do fall on the son but not all is as it seems. 

In this day and age, having the son bear responsibility for the sins of the father seems to be an outdated idea or at least one where the Bible is misinterpreted as it states, “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father.” 

Japan also has a feudal tradition called katakiuchi which is also the taking of revenge against someone who has killed an ancestor of the avenging party. Fortunately, in today’s society, it is against the law to take the law into one’s own hand. If not, who knows how many unnecessary deaths would continue. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Amur River: Between Russia and China by Colin Thubron (HarperCollins Publishers)

What is an eighty-year-old man doing, riding horseback through Mongolia and staunchly ignoring his injured ankle as it turns amber and black? To complicate matters even more, this octagenarian is at the beginning of a journey to travel the length of a river that’s perhaps the eighth longest in the world--or maybe the tenth. 

The Amur is probably the greatest river you’ve never heard of. With more than 200 tributaries, it flows for 2,826 miles, through Siberia, past China, and into the Pacific Ocean. It forms a 1000-mile border between Russia and China, “a fault-line shrouded in old mistrust.”

Colin Thubron is determined to follow the Amur River, from the source of its first tributary in Mongolia’s sacred and forbidden territory until it enters the Pacific. If anybody can accomplish this, it’s Thubron, a man who has spent his life traveling and writing, with a staggering total of eleven works of travel literature and eight novels. He’s known as a “gifted linguist,” a knowledge that gives a deeper dimension to his writing than that of many other travelers.  While most travel writing is solipsistic because of the isolation that linguistic ignorance guarantees, Thubron enters fully into every region he visits.

In this journey he is instantly immersed in the “icy torrent of light” cast by the Milky Way upon the Mongolian grassland and “a tide of wildflowers” that surrounds him in daylight. In the company of three Mongolians and with the grudging permission of officials, Thubron sets off to find the Amur’s furthest tributary, the Onon, which springs from the sacred mountains that spawned Genghis Khan and may hold his burial ground. Even on horseback, this is an arduous journey, through the evergreen forests of the taiga and the bogs that border them, with mudholes that can easily engulf a horse--and does. Thubron’s mount sinks and rolls, its weight trapping him and injuring his ribs. With pain alternating between ankle and ribcage, Thubron continues.  After reaching “a trickle of water,” the beginning of the Onon, he and his companions follow it back to the grasslands, a three-hundred-mile start of a much longer adventure.

Traveling by jeep, Thubron travels through blood-soaked country, where the Baryat Mongols from Siberia were imprisoned and killed by the Soviet government in the 30’s, their history still living in the stories of survivors, “the direct memory people.” Thubron himself revives the memory of the Xiongnu people who once threatened China as he drives through the region where their burial grounds live. “Horses haunt these graves,” he says, the skeletons of those who were sacrificed within the tombs, their harnesses, the jars filled with theirr bones. 

Thubron follows the Onan into Russia, where it becomes the Shilka River on one bank and the Heilongjiang on its opposite side. It’s a border between Russia and China that at times is less than half a mile in width, where the glittering modernity of a Chinese city faces a haphazardly preserved past in a Russian town.  Russian markets are filled with Chinese goods, transported across the river by Russian laborers, “camels.” their Chinese employers call them. China is feared and hated, even by the Russians who profit from doing business with them. Rumors persist that the Chinese are everywhere, planning to make Siberia their next province. 

Following Chekhov on that writer’s journey down the Amur which claimed Anton’s “unsentimental heart” with its “million gorgeous landscapes,” Thubron is stopped by police in an encounter that threatens to derail his journey, a disaster that is avoided for reasons he never understands. He moves through the history of slaughtered tribal people and massacred Chinese, of Pu Yi, the last emperor, held briefly in Siberia where his servants still brushed his teeth and tied his shoes, and traces of Manchu heritage in a Chinese village where he hears one of the last surviving speakers of Manchu speak a language that is known by no more than twenty people nationwide. 

Because the region’s savage winters make river travel impossible, Thubron postpones the final leg of his journey until the following spring. Six months later he returns, his body healed of what British doctors diagnosed as two fractured ribs and a broken fibula in his ankle. He moves north, into the land of indigenous people who live among bears and birch forests. Rumors claim they worship bears and their myths are filled with stories of women who bore children fathered by a bear. With Russian guides, he embarks on a fishing trip into the wilderness where bears are commonplace and rumors consist of the return of tigers. 

Thubron’s companions ignore the truth that they’re fishing out of season and so do the local police, who give them tips on where the best fish can be caught. They catch and feast upon a six-foot Amur sturgeon, a species that’s been off-limits for thirty years. When the police see what they bagged, they laugh and move on. Later when Thubron and his companions find an eight-foot Kaluga sturgeon who has had her caviar gouged from her body, even the poachers are disgusted. 

When he reaches his final destination, it’s a town with streets “barely woken after winter,” a place with a “louring past” of battles and massacres, one that was destroyed by fire and “grew piecemeal from the ashes.” The mouth of the Amur “yawns three miles wide” before it spills into the ocean and Thubron ends his account abruptly, as if he hated to have reached the end. 

Even this man, who has turned his travels into an art form that brings the places he goes, the people he meets, the history he encounters, vividly and thoughtfully alive in his books, has occasional qualms that every traveler has known: “Then I feel how liitle I understand where I am, and travel seems an exercise in failure.” 

This is a temporary slump. Thubron emerges to relish the sight of “ a thick, unending parapet of trees,” conversations with a man who venerates Cossacks and their never-ending spree of blood, with a woman whose grandmother was one of the last shaman, with people who live off the barren land of Siberia, and stories of a bear festival that once persisted, drenched in brutality. This is the traveler we all wish to be, futilely. There is only one Colin Thubron, moving onward into his eighties, redefining what age can mean to those who have the courage to ignore it.~Janet Brown