Are You an Echo? The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko by David Jacobson (Chin Music Press)

“Are you an echo?” is the haunting, provocative question posed by the title of the first children’s book to come from Seattle publisher Chin Music Press.  It is also the title of a poem that helped to rally and inspire the Japanese people after the tsunami of 2011 claimed many lives, demolished homes, and left wreckage in its wake. Broadcast as a public service announcement, these words moved hundreds of thousands of volunteers to join in rebuilding the devastated regions of their country.

The poem was written by a young woman almost a hundred years earlier, a woman whose brief life lasted for only twenty-six years but who left a lasting legacy of 512 poems. Born on Japan’s seacoast, Misuzu Kaneko was the daughter of a single mother, a girl who was brought up within a bookstore, and whose life was filled with words and images. By the time she was twenty, Misuzu was a published and popular poet. She continued to write even after she was drawn into an unhappy marriage and became the mother of a cherished daughter. Long after her tragic and untimely death, in 1982 her poetry was published in six volumes and is included in the curriculum taught to students in Japanese primary schools.

Misuzu’s poems are reminiscent of both Basho and Emily Dickinson, while having a vivid and humorous flavor that is distinct and original. Their simplicity captures and celebrates the world of childhood, while their underlying wisdom and precise imagery issues a clear and irresistible call to adult readers. Are You an Echo? provides a generous sampling of these poems, both in English and in Japanese, accompanied by soft and tender illustrations that intertwine seamlessly with Misuzu’s words.

Author David Jacobson was “thoroughly charmed” when he first encountered Misuzu’s poems and he has woven them into the story of her life in a way that is both captivating and revealing. In his skillful hands, Misuzu’s brief existence of art, fame, unhappiness, debilitating illness, and suicide takes on the beauty of a fable or a fairy tale, a story that children will easily understand and will not forget.

Are You an Echo? is an unusual achievement, a labor of love that has emerged from four separate talents in three different countries. In the United States, Jacobson, a man fluent in Japanese, first read these poems in their original language when a Japanese friend gave him a volume of Misuzu’s work. Struck by their clarity and beauty, he wanted to make them available in English, along with a brief story of the poet’s life that would be suitable for children. Jacobson has had a long association with Chin Music Press, who agreed to work with him on a picture book that would combine a collection of Misuzu’s poetry with the story of her life and work.

Jacobson’s research for his book was both scholarly and rigorous, leading him to read two Japanese biographies of Misuzu’s life as well as all of her poetry. Despite his competency in the Japanese language, he believed the poems deserved “a literary translator, particularly one adept in poetry.” In his search, he found two translators who were already deeply immersed in the life and work of Misuzu Kaneko.

Canadian poet Sally Ito and her aunt, Michiko Tsuboi, a translator living in Japan, had been working collaboratively on bringing Misuzu’s poems to English for more than a year before they were asked to work with Jacobson and Chin Music Press. “We felt called, in a way, to be a team in bringing Misuzu’s poetry and spirit to life in English,” Ito explained, adding that it was emotionally wrenching for both women, each of them a mother,  “to grapple with the fact of a mother committing suicide to ostensibly ‘save’ her daughter,” as Misuzu had felt compelled to do. Working across continents and time zones, Ito and Tsuboi sent emails back and forth in their commitment to bring Misuzu’s “depth and compassion” to another language and a new audience.

Their translations and Jacobson’s story have been wonderfully illuminated by the paintings of a thirty-five-year old Japanese artist, Toshikado Hajiri. Working with pencil and acrylics, Hajiri moves from the delicate pastel shades of a mother and child at sunset to the soft darkness of a star-filled sky, from the flames consuming a tsunami-ravaged village to the weary figure of a woman writing her last words beneath the radiance of one small lamp and a single white butterfly. The loveliness and sensitivity of his illustrations, blending masterfully with the text, put Are You an Echo? on lists of possible Caldecott nominees weeks before the book ever hit bookstore shelves.

“Are you just an echo? No, you are everyone,” Misuzu tells us in the poem that gave the title to Are You an Echo? And everyone is exactly who will love this book, “this unconventional “mash-up’ of biography and poetry,” as Jacobson describes it, served up with elegance and craftsmanship.~Janet Brown

This review was previously published in the International Examiner.

Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig (Grove Atlantic)

On a hot and airless afternoon last summer, I stayed inside and read Miss Burma, a strange book that took on the fictional-biographical shape of Vaddy Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan, but much less successfully. This is a quasi-novel which is bogged down by its history, while the author should have stuck with the phenomenon who was her own mother, the legendary Louisa.

The book only flares into life when Louisa, Miss Burma, is on stage and again when she faces the future tragedy she has yet to know when she takes on the leadership left by her dead husband. But there is all too little of Louisa, far too much of her parents' history, and this sinks the novel.

An extraordinary woman who used her beauty wisely, Louisa remains legendary among the Karen, who claim that she is still alive, riding through the jungle on a white horse. Half-Karen herself, she grew up dominated by the politics of separatism and nationalism, a child whose life was war-torn and uncertain, who quickly learned that only her beauty could save her.

She covered her courage and her brain with the advantages given to her by her face and figure, until a general saw through her stunning mask and married her for the qualities that the rest of the world was eager to overlook. And that is the story of Miss Burma, padded much too generously with Louisa's mother’s life story and her father's role as a device to convey the country's history. As a novel it fails. It turns Louisa into little more than a footnote and thus it barely works.

But even so it sent me to the Internet to learn more about this woman and that means the author achieved at least part of what she wanted to do. Although Charmaine Craig's choice to focus on the efforts of her grandparents more than she did on her mother was a bad mistake, she probably thought it was the nobler approach. Her attempt to honor a wide panorama of history rather than the story of a beautiful freedom fighter who led guerrilla soldiers as a young widow, eventually married an American, and continued her struggle from the U.S. is praiseworthy but mistaken. Her passion lies with her mother and Louisa is the life of the book.

But it was a brave attempt and Craig deserves points for trying. I’ll keep the book for awhile and reread the ending that I raced through last night, history-bogged as it was. The final paragraphs are perhaps the most gripping of the entire novel but are also the most flawed. We know Louisa lived because she gave birth to the author, but we have no idea in what manner she survived her  crossing of the Salween River and her time of fighting alongside a brutal leader of men. One more chapter that took those last paragraphs and expanded them would have made such a difference in the entire work. It's a pity that Charmaine Craig didn't do it.~Janet Brown

Defiled on the Ayeyarwaddy by Ma Thanegi (ThingsAsian Press)

Of course it wasn’t Ma Thanegi’s fault that I found myself risking my life trudging beside a busy highway on the outskirts of Penang’s suburbs. Just because I was reading her latest book Defiled on the Ayeyarwaddy when I overshot my bus stop, so immersed in her longing to play the drums at a Kachin festival that I was half-way to the airport before I looked up and realized my error, I have no reason to blame that on her. God knows I’d been eager enough to rush downtown to get her book and bring it home—and it was my greedy curiosity that made me rip the package open before I even left the post office.

Just because I was still thinking about the stones she had found at the beginning of the Ayeyarwaddy River, which she had someone polish into smooth, cool beads and string into necklaces and bracelets, and was feeling blessed that she had given one of each to me, and wondered what they had looked like when Thanegi found them and crammed her pockets full—this was no reason to mentally castigate her while I walked cautiously along a little grassy strip as cars whizzed past me.

I tried hard not to let my mind wander to the prospectors who dredge one of the rivers that becomes part of the Ayeyarwaddy, looking for gold, wondering how similar they were to Alaskan gold panners, and forced myself not to think about the woman with the baby strapped to her back whom Thanegi talked to, the one who dreamed of finding lumps of gold as big as peanuts in the round wooden tray that served as her gold pan.

But as I realized my trek was taking me into the territory of a freeway and retraced my steps to find a less hazardous route, I began to think about the quiet villages and rock-strewn roads and the ice-cold, clear water that began Ma Thanegi’s 1300-mile trip down the Ayeyarwaddy river and felt envious. I roamed past squat, ugly, cement “link houses” with a strong pang of gratitude that I didn’t live in one of them and wondered why some women find themselves wandering in search of a bus stop while others boat-hop their way down one of the world’s great rivers.

When I found a bus that would take me home, I refused to allow myself to go any further with Ma Thanegi until I had entered my apartment. After all, it’s not as though I hadn’t read it before, I scolded myself, I’d edited it, for God’s sake. But even though at one point a year or so ago, I practically knew every page of this book by heart, I couldn’t wait to plop down on my couch and keep reading.

A whole day shot to hell, I thought happily as I sank back into Thanegi’s verbal company. Drat the woman, I echoed her long-suffering pal, Ko Sunny, here we go again…

Ma Thanegi is my friend; I am her editor at ThingsAsian Press. I can’t review this book. But I can lose myself in it, I can get lost while reading it, and I can tell everyone I know that if they want to meet one of my favorite people in the world, take a trip with her down the Ayeyarwaddy. Just don’t begin your journey while you’re still on a bus.~Janet Brown

Available at ThingsAsian Books

Thailand's Best Street Food by Chawadee Nualkhair (Tuttle)

All over the world people are looking for street food, except perhaps for the people who grew up eating it. They’re often looking for more “sophistication” in their dining choices, which range from McDonalds to sous vide, depending on their income levels. They’re replaced by travelers, whose eagerness to find street food is exceeded only by their ignorance. Where? What? When? (And sometimes)—Why?
 

Several years ago, Chawadee Nualkhair brought light to the darkness for Bangkok visitors when she wrote Bangkok’s Top 50 Street Food Stalls, which is now out of print but still relevant if you can find one on alibris or at a used bookstore. (I suggest Dasa Books and Coffee in Bangkok.) In its wake, she brings Thailand’s Best Street Food to eaters whose ambition surpasses their local knowledge—or for Thai residents who are overwhelmed by their culinary choices.

It may seem hubristic to the point of madness to narrow Thailand’s street food choices to a scant 160 pages, but that isn’t what Ms. Nualkhair is doing. She has written a sort of eater’s primer, giving a springboard of information that will launch the reader’s own journey of discovery—or, with any luck at all, her own series of street food guides to the regions she introduces in her latest book.

She begins with questions: Is street food dying out? What is a street food stall? How did she make her selections for this book? The question and answer that I loved best in her first book is absent here: How do you determine the hygiene of a particular vendor? Nualkhair’s advice is look carefully at the jars that hold condiments; if they aren’t clean, walk away.

A visual glossary to different kinds of noodles with accompanying ingredients and broth, fried noodles, rice dishes, appetizers and snacks, desserts, and beverages, with names in both English and Thai is almost worth the price of the book. Don’t want ice in your drink? Point to the Thai script for it and shake your head vigorously with a dramatic rendition of “Nononono." The only thing missing is the Thai script for “Where is the toilet?” which just might come in handy.

Otherwise the reader is covered, beyond a doubt. There are maps to each culinary destination; there are names and addresses of the food stalls both in English and in Thai, there are wonderful and tempting photographs (that certainly deserve more space than they have been given), and every so often there is a recipe—Elvis Suki’s Grilled Scallops, anyone? Adventurous eaters are even told which stalls have restrooms and which do not provide bathroom tissue.

The choices range from north to south, with the greatest concentration given to Bangkok. But every region is given careful attention—think quality over quantity, along with information that will help in conducting further independent study.

Really, what more does anyone need? On my next trip to Thailand, this book is going along too.~Janet Brown

Bangkok's Top Fifty Street Food Stalls by Chawadee Nualkhair (Wordplay)

I'll never forget how amazed I was when I first arrived in Bangkok and a friend took me for my first meal. We sat by the side of a road on teetering chairs with friendly dogs waiting to see what we ordered and ate some of the best food I'd ever had in my life.

But I was lucky. I had a friend who lived here who helped initiate me into the wonderful world of street stalls. Even now, sixteen years later, when I go to a new neighborhood in Bangkok, I'm overwhelmed by the food choices and sometimes by the looks of the unfamiliar food carts. I know the food is going to be terrific but where to start and how much will selective blindness play in my decision?

I am a huge fan of eating on the street. Not only is it more fun than a food court, the food is usually fresher, since few food stalls have access to refrigeration. but I often wonder--if I hadn't been guided by a friend early on, would I have ventured into the joys of street food? How do travelers who have only a few days in Bangkok become immersed in this part of Thai culture?

The answer is easy now--they buy this book. Chawadee Nualkhair has made food pilgrimages to neighborhoods that travelers often frequent and has found places she loves there. In a city with "300,000 to 500,000 food stalls," she has narrowed the choices down to a manageable number, with dishes ranging from fish maw soup in Chinatown to samosas in the Sikh neighborhood, from mussel omelets to pork satay--and yes-- phad thai and papaya salad too. She offers a comprehensive glossary of Thai desserts and beverages (butterfly pea juice anyone?) with a dictionary of useful phrases like "Where is the bathroom?" written both in English transliteration and in Thai. (Essential for those of us who find tonal languages daunting.)

Perhaps the saddest part of this book today is her description of Soi 38 on Sukhumvit Road, which was once Bangkok's most convenient "food stall market", offering a splendid variety of choices as evening approaches and the night air turns cool(er). Providing food for the hungry from six at night until three the next morning, this is now gone in the name of progress

Yet there are also sections of this book that still thrive and will keep even those jaded Old Bangkok Hands happy as well, with food in the Hualamphong area and Chinatown--and maps to make the discovery process painless.

The perfect size to tuck into my bag, this book is my new best friend-read it and eat! Its wonderful photographs are sure to jump-start your appetite--and that's a good thing. If you're here for a week, you're going to want to try all 50 of Chawadee's choices. (Just be prepared to eat seven meals a day--and eight on Sunday!)~Janet Brown

Mindfulness and Murder by Nick Wilgus (Crime Wave Press)

What! A mystery set in Bangkok without a bar-girl to be seen, in which the detective is completely Thai and a Buddhist monk to boot? Yes, that's right--Father Ananda is a man who observes all of the 227 precepts that are demanded of Theravada monks, which means no alcohol, no nicotine, no joys of the flesh--not even coffee passes his lips. He's a far cry from most of the crime-solvers in Bangkok--but then authors write about what they know and author Nick Wilgus clearly knows more about Bangkok than what can be seen from a bar stool.

When a body is found inside a large water jar in one of the temple's bathrooms, eyes gouged out, skin embellished with cigarette burns, and a large yellow candle jammed into its mouth, Father Ananda is one of the first to know. Before taking his vows, he was a police officer, a man all too familiar with the smell of death, and his abbot charges him with the task of finding who the murderer might be, working with the police from the privileged position of a monastic insider.

The dead body is that of Noi, one of the temple boys, street kids who find food and shelter on sacred ground. Like many of them, this boy has a past filled with drugs, violence, and sexual abuse. Father Ananda soon discovers that Noi had been part of a drug-trafficking ring within the temple--one that may involve the monks themselves. When one of the monks disappears, leaving a hidden cache of drugs behind, Father Ananda is certain that some of his monastic brothers are not who they pretend to be.

Mindfulness and Murder introduces one of the most intriguing detectives since Hercules Poirot and "his little grey cells." Father Ananda is a complex character who became a monk after his wife and son were slaughtered in an act of underworld retaliation. He carries his grief and anger deep below his Buddhist practice and the ancient prayers he has memorized; he wrestles with the memory of physical affection and his innately Thai appreciation of good food. He brusquely rejects the tender respect shown by Jak, the boy who helps him with tasks of daily living in return for the teaching that a senior monk provides. On the outside, he is an observant monk; on the inside Father Ananda is an emotional minefield.

And he is an analytical detective, well aware of the criminal mind and the world it thrives in. While set in the quiet serenity of a Buddhist temple, Father Ananda presents readers with a knowledgeable view of a Bangkok rarely shown in fiction--its street life, its food stalls, its hidden neighborhoods--all within the framework of a mystery that serves up a macabre surprise in a coffin and a murderous cobra.

Previously published in Thailand, Mindfulness and Murder introduces a series of Father Ananda mysteries, and was made into a critically acclaimed movie that promptly went on the international film festival circuit and now can be seen on Netflix. Weighing in at just a whisper over 200 pages, this mystery packs more excitement and background information than any of its bloated counterparts. Forget John Burdett--Nick Wilgus is Our Man in Bangkok (even if he has moved to the U.S.)~Janet Brown

The Secret of the Nightingale Palace by Dana Sachs (William Morrow)

Yesterday was the sort of Sunday that Seattle loves to inflict on its inhabitants, so dark that my lamps were on all day and the rain trickled on and off in an annoying drip. I picked up a book that I had been meaning to read for a week, fell into it, and stayed there until bedtime--The Secret of the Nightingale Palace is that sort of book.

This morning I woke up haunted by its heroine, simply because I'd never encountered her in fiction before. Surprisingly and originally, center stage wasn't taken by the young widow, but the 85-year-old grandmother.

Goldie pops into life on the first page and it's clear that she isn't the typical matriarch; if Anna "had known it was her grandmother calling, she would not have answered at all." Fortunately she picks up and begins a reluctant adventure, driving her grandmother from Manhattan to San Francisco in a vintage Rolls-Royce.

At the onset of World War II, Goldie was given a portfolio of priceless Japanese prints to keep safe for a friend who faced internment. Now she wants to return them to her friend's brother, who owns a large antique business on the opposite coast--and what Goldie wants, Goldie gets.

What begins as a simple road trip novel is soon usurped by Goldie's story, Goldie's style, Goldie's secret. The story folds back into San Francisco of the 1940s, where a smart and charismatic young woman finds her footing in one of the city's leading department stores. She falls deeply in love with a man she can't have and has the brains to go on with her life without him. She educates herself in deliberate ways. "I made a conscious decision," she tells a friend, "I decided to love Madeleine Vionnet and to hate Schiaparelli."

Much of Goldie's life is pragmatic, but it's always suffused with joy--she never ventures into Scarlett O'Hara territory. She's too smart for that. And she's smart enough to never tell everything she knows--her inner life remains wrapped in Armani and Jean Paul Gaultier until the last page of the last chapter.

Nothing in this delightful novel is exactly what it is expected to be. The Nightingale Palace itself is an elegant joke, Goldie's successful first marriage is based upon an unspoken truth, the reason for her cross-country odyssey with her granddaughter becomes almost irrelevant as the trip progresses. What is always marvelously clear is Goldie's allure, undimmed by age.

"Cognizant" is one of Goldie's favorite words. By the time she is done, everyone who meets her is cognizant of how love of life can keep a woman vibrant, attractive, and a force of nature well into old age.~Janet Brown

 

Yokohama Yankee by Leslie Helm (Chin Music Press)

Nihonjinron, the theory of “Japaneseness”, the belief that “the Japanese are a special race of people”, is briefly introduced by Leslie Helm at the beginning of his family memoir, Yokohama Yankee. Over the next three hundred pages, he will write around this theory, never directly about it, making his book both subtle and frustrating. His narrative loops in and out of different time periods, different lives, different parts of the world, never completely confronting the question of what it is to be Japanese in a body that declares itself a foreigner, but always glancing and hinting at the surreal state of “shifting from one dimension to another.”

My Family’s Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan is the subtitle to Yokohama Yankee. The title itself is ambiguous, because the only fully Western member of the Helm family was German, not a Yankee at all. None of patriarch Julius Helm’s children, born of a Japanese mother, publicly assumed any identity other than German. Julius’s youngest son, captured as a German soldier fighting in China during the first World War, was a Japanese prisoner of war and identified in the press as “ainoko” or “in between.” The word also, Leslie Helms explains, means “mongrel dog.” “What was it like to be compared to a mongrel dog?” he asks. It’s a question that he explores by describing the short and tortured life of his own father, a narrative that weaves in and out of his family history from the first chapter to the last.

Half Japanese, Donald Helm was the son of a business magnate who was born in the United States, had an American passport, grew up as a German, and married a woman who was also German/Japanese. Surrounded by Western friends from different countries who all spoke English, Donald left Japan when he was fourteen for California, at the beginning of World War II.

His family spent the war hiding their Japanese blood to avoid internment. “They’ll say we are Japanese,” Donald’s father told him in 1943 when the FBI was on the way to the Helm household, “It’s a lie. Just ignore it. Remember we are Americans.” Soon after the visitation, the local newspaper’s headline blared “Piedmont Helms Japs.” It was perhaps the first time Donald had been directly confronted with the knowledge that on both sides of his family, he was half Japanese, as well as German, and an American citizen.

It’s a sad irony that at the one time when the Helm family’s German and Japanese heritage would have been buttressed by the alliance between Germany and Japan, the U.S. passports of Donald’s family again put them in the position of being outsiders. When Donald returned to Japan, he came back as one of the country's conquerors, part of the occupying army.

His son Leslie was born in Japan, raised as American, and is one-quarter Japanese. “Growing up in Japan as a foreigner, a gaijin, that outsider status became a central part of my identity…always on display, separated from the society around me.”

Not until much later in his life, when he and his American wife adopt two children who are fully Japanese, does Leslie understand that the society and culture of Japan can also bestow “outsider status” upon its own citizens. The bloodlines and pedigrees of Japanese families, the knowledge of who one’s forbears were, makes adoption unpopular. “If Japanese families found it so difficult to adopt Japanese children just because they were biologically unrelated to them, I asked, how could they ever hope to accept people from different cultures?”

Although the five generations of the Helm family in Japan were successful and respectable, part of their family history, the Japanese part, was almost thoroughly obscured, while much of their heritage in Germany would always be a mystery. Yokohama Yankee uncovers the Japanese roots of this family, the dazzling and often tragic history of the nation that would never claim them, and the details of Leslie’s search to reconcile the disparities that had destroyed his father. It is a book that is both oblique and revealing, one that raises as many questions as it answers.~Janet Brown

This review was previously published in the International Examiner.

Romancing the East by Jerry Hopkins (Tuttle)

Jerry Hopkins is approaching the 40-book mark and for that alone we should all go to Bangkok and take him out on the town. His writing life has swept from rock-and-roll L.A. to Hawaii to Thailand, and his biography of Jim Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive, has become a classic. If there's one writer who's fully qualified to examine the lives and work of other writers, it's the redoubtable Mr. Hopkins.

His latest book is subtitled A Literary Odyssey from the Heart of Darkness to the River Kwai, and it's a trip worth taking. Think of it as a series of conversations about almost every writer who has ever made Asia their subject matter--thirty-four writers in thirty-two essays. It's far too lively a discussion to be thought of as a survey course of literature about Asia--the opinions and insights found here are born from a barroom, not a classroom. And that is a very good thing indeed. 

Hopkins examines the lives, work, and settings of other authors in a way that makes you want to read the books he writes about and find out more information about their authors. Each essay is carefully and thoughtfully written by a man who obviously loves to read and who respects the writers whose books come into his life.

Not for him the cheap shot--he uses humor in his portrayals of writers but he is never snide. It's difficult to imagine that anyone could find something new to say about Anna Leonowens, the lady whose book is still banned in the Kingdom of Thailand, as well as the movies that were spawned by it, but Hopkins does. "...Anna Leonowens was the Victorian era's version of a "gonzo" journalist, a predecessor to Hunter Thompson, a writer with imagination and bravado who didn't let facts get in the way of a good story." Suddenly a picture of a hoop-skirted lady sitting beside Hunter in the backseat of a convertible with the top down, "just outside of Barstow when the drugs kicked in," is rooted in the imaginations of readers, and Anna and the King of Siam will never be the same.

"Elfish everything seems, for everything as well as everybody is small, and queer, and mysterious," Hopkins quotes Lafcadio Hearn in 19th century Japan and then remarks, "It is as if the writer were describing a visit to Middle Earth, where hobbits lived." Hopkins is a master at hooking his readers with a well-turned description and then launching into a provocative literary discussion; his essay on Kipling alone, with literary criticism by Teddy Roosevelt included, is enough to bring a whole new wave of readers to Kim.

Hopkins is not, as he terms W. Somerset Maugham with a fair degree of asperity, "a predatory gossip." In his examination of Marguerite Duras, he tells about her sexagenarian habit of downing "up to nine liters of cheap Bordeaux a day" as a way of explaining her limited literary output at that time ("as little as one sentence a day.") And he all but cheers for her when she "sobers up in 1982 at a Paris hospital" and finishes the book that will make her famous, The Lover, when she is 68 years old.

Even when he could rightfully be vicious, when he writes about what he knows well that has been claimed by men who know it far less thoroughly, Jerry Hopkins is kind, fair-minded, and insightful. Michel Houellebecq and John Burdett are followers of a time-honored tradition, come to Thailand, find the sex industry, and write about it. "Their novels placed in Thailand," Hopkins says, "...were among the better crafted of the lot, but none of the others exceeded them in grisly exploitation, creating a Thailand that was not only licentious, but also ridiculous." He goes on to back up this assessment by letting the writers' books prove it for him, which they accomplish masterfully.

"For those who enjoy sleeping with literary ghosts," Hopkins provides locations where these august shades might still be hanging around. Although by no means a guidebook, tucking away a copy of Romancing the East in the bottom of a carry-on could be one of the happiest decisions that a traveler to Asia will make. Take it on a plane with you; give it to a friend; find Jerry Hopkins and buy him a beer. ~Janet Brown

Overbooked by Elizabeth Becker (Simon & Schuster)

Mass tourism is becoming a world-changing industry, says Elizabeth Becker, with international borders crossed by "a billion travelers" in 2012 and more to come in the future. It's an industry that "creates $3 billion dollars in business every day. If frequent-flier miles were a currency, it would be one of the most valuable in the world." "At least one out of every ten people around the world is employed by the industry, according to Wolfgang Weinz of the International Labor Organization."

It's also an industry with little regulation and superficial information. Travel writing is largely a collection of puff pieces in glossy magazines, and bland, almost unreadable laudatory journalism in newspaper travel sections. Online information is dominated by the dubious wisdom provided by Wikipedia and hotel booking websites. Hard facts are hard to come by.

This is why Overbooked is both a blessing and a disappointment. Becker seems confused about whether she should write about what she has experienced or what she has gleaned from other sources. Her section on cruise travel is informative and  shocking--and personal. She's been there, done that, and investigated without pulling punches. The exploitation of cruise ship workers, the pollution caused by the ships' untreated sewage when on the open seas, and the environmental impact caused by brief, rapid surges of thousands of shoppers in Alaska, Venice, and Belize is well explained in this portion of Overbooked.

China, "at the center of the tourism gold rush" is given short shrift, to the point that it's justifiable to wonder if Becker has been there since her initial trip in 1978. In less than fifty pages, she races through a thumbnail history of change since the Communist victory in 1949, focusing on Beijing and its "cultural suicide," going from "every storybook about old China," to "a modern "Anywhere" city; looking skeptically at quotes from Western tourists about their Chinese travel experiences; reporting statistics given by hoteliers and owners of tour businesses; closing with her own time spent with rapacious tour guides in polluted areas. This section is so scanty and so formulaic that it feels as though Becker, pressed by a deadline, simply fleshed out her notes.

Far better is her section on travel in Cambodia, as one would expect from the woman who wrote the brilliant history of that country, "When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Revolution. Becker clearly knows and loves Cambodia; she devotes less space to it than she does to China but the difference is for Cambodia, every one of her words counts. She writes eloquently and knowledgeably about the destructive effects of mass tourism on the splendors of Angkor Wat, of the commercialization of the Pol Pot years at Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek, centers of "dark tourism," the land grabs that, since 2000, have "evicted over 100,000 people in Phom Penh alone," the casinos that have been built on the country's borders, "at least 32" of them, attracting gamblers, money launderers, and sex tourists.

When she embarks upon the subject of sex tourism, Becker becomes sloppy, muddling statistics of men who have sex with prostitutes with stories of men who have sex with children, Citing Somaly Mam's autobiography of her forcible entry into prostitution at the age of twelve, her repeated torture and rape as a sex slave, Becker links this to the evils of sex tourism, while ignoring that Somaly's prostitution was in brothels that served Cambodian men. This sort of cavalier approach to a tragic situation serves nobody, least of all the credibility of Overbooked.

Becker is at her best when she carefully researches the different forms of travel that exist for the discriminating tourist: ecotourism, medical tourism, safari tourism, shopping tourism, retired-senior tourism. Dubai is eviscerated as the luxury-shopping capital of the world, and Costa Rica is revealed as a natural paradise, successfully coping with over 2 million tourists a year. Still even when she shows herself as the fine journalist that her readers have come to expect, she provides a quick overview of too much, too fast. "...this book is not meant to be encyclopedic," Becker tells us, but it could have been more substantial. Overbooked is overstuffed and underdone--and that is too bad.~Janet Brown

Burmese Light by Tom Vater and Hans Kemp (Visionary Press)

Stone Buddha statues poised near the golden evening glow of an intricately carved temple wall, the gleam of gold radiating from the legendary Shwedagon Pagoda that defines the Yangon skyline, a line of young nuns garbed in rose-pink robes—this book’s introduction to Burma is portrayed through images of that country’s strong spiritual faith, which underpins Burmese Light as it does the country itself. The beauty of its temples, the bare feet of monks as they walk on their alms rounds, the playfulness of novice nuns and monks who are still children, the 4000 temple ruins stretching across the plain of Bagan, all shown against a glorious open sky with its rich variety of light, are the images that comprise much of this book. They are almost otherworldly in their undisturbed relationship to the world that swirls around them, a backdrop that is both natural and man-made, enduring and temporal, changing faster in the past year than it has in previous decades.

A procession of oxcarts makes its way to a traditional village Nat Festival; there they will watch men in heavy make-up and ornate robes become mediums for the spirits that briefly take up residence within the body of the men who channel them. A heavily laden motorcycle transports young lambs to market, one sprawled across the driver’s lap, two more peering from a basket that’s tightly bungie-corded to a platform built over the rear tire. In Yangon the traffic that flows past the Shwedagon is decidedly more modern—vans, SUVs, shiny new automobiles. Burma missed a large portion of the 20th century; now it’s eager to leap into the 21st.  “By the end of the 19th century,” author Tom Vater says of Yangon, “it boasted public services on a par with those of London.” Infrastructure has crumbled since then and inhabitants are hungry for civic improvements.

Although showing colonial buildings in Yangon and the old palace moat in Mandalay, Hans Kemp’s photographs linger longest in the countryside where women sell bundles of firewood and men harvest rice by hand, where cheroots are smoked and betel is chewed, and women beautify their faces with swirls of a sunscreen and cosmetic paste ground from the bark of a thanaka tree. The diversity of the country’s people is well-represented in Burmese Light; with “some 135 distinct ethnic groups” bringing their cultures and customs to that of the Burmese, “who make up almost 70-90% of the population and dominate public life.” Beautiful, proud faces fill the pages of this book, jostling with the stunning landscape shots for pride of place.

In their creative collaboration, Kemp and Vater provide a taste of a country that is transforming itself, documenting Burma as changes began to come. This is far from a typical coffee table book. It’s a springboard into more exploration, more illumination, more… I'm begging for a sequel.~Janet Brown

Bizarre Thailand by Jim Algie (Marshall Cavendish)

When I bought books for an overnight train ride recently, one of them I’d already read,  I was living in Bangkok when Jim Algie’s Bizarre Thailand came out; it was in my personal library until I gave away excess baggage weight when I returned to the states. But I enjoy owning books written by friends so I bought a replacement copy. Halfway through my 22-hour trip, I opened it and found a whole new book waiting for me.

When I  still lived in Thailand, I was entertained by the glimpses into the bizarre and the grotesque that Jim provided, but the details of the book I ignored because they were all around me, every day. When I first read the small descriptions and insights that Jim provides, I shrugged. Yeah, yeah, right, let’s get on with it. But now I live in Seattle, returning to Bangkok once a year, and what delighted me most about Bizarre Thailand on my second reading is how well the book conveys the special quality of ordinary life in the Kingdom.

Where else but Thailand would a government coup be announced on TV with the words, “We have taken control of the city. Apologies for the inconvenience”? Or would the decision to replace gunfire executions of prisoners with death by lethal injection be celebrated at one of Bangkok’s grimmest prisons with performing pop stars, dancing ladyboys and the release of “more than 300 balloons to symbolize the spirits” of executed prisoners in the past? Or would gifts of toys, candy, and flowers be left for dead foetuses on display in glass jars at a grisly medical museum exhibit?

One of the people I like best in Bangkok is wonderfully profiled in the book’s fifth chapter, along with the information of where old CIA “spooks” hang out and where to hear Peter Driscoll and the Cruisers play British rockabilly (terrific musicians, by the way.) 

Close to Bangkok’s neon and noise is a quiet community where people go out in boats after dark to view thousands of fireflies flashing in the night—far from bizarre Thailand. In a nearby province, tourists are taken for overnight hikes in the jungle by seasoned troops, and farther down the road, a dude ranch waits to indulge the Inner Cowboy that lurks within many. 

Thailand’s deeply rooted respect for the supernatural is brought to light with anecdotes of a former Prime Minister making offerings to the God of Darkness, and the author’s girlfriend approaching a fertility shrine with trepidation, certain that she would become pregnant as a result. And the longstanding rivalry between Cambodia and Thailand is made clear through the prejudices of that same girlfriend, whose personality is so strong that at times she threatens to take over the book. (Throughout Bizarre Thailand, Jim persistently shows the face of Thai women as smart, strong people—whether they are the country’s leading forensic expert, a transgender Thai boxing champion, or the founder of Empower, a group that educates sex workers.)

Where to find vegetarian food during Buddhist Lent (look for the yellow flags on street vendors’ carts), where to have your fortune told (take a translator), where to gain merit by buying a coffin for a destitute corpse (Wat Hualamphong), where to have a drink in Chiang Mai at a place where your money is going to help the female staff have regular days off, sick leave, and Social Security (the Can Do Bar)—these are some of the details that underpin the stories of the eccentric and sometimes sinister people who are unveiled in Bizarre Thailand. And these details are the ones that will enrich your stay in the Kingdom, whether you’re there for a week or for the rest of your life. Thank you, Jim Algie.~Janet Brown

Singapore Noir edited by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan (Akashic Press)

Shanghai, Saigon, Bangkok—through the centuries these cities have taken on the alluring shadows of carnality and vice. But Singapore? A city where you can drink the tap water but can’t chew gum on the street, where, as myth has it, cameras are hidden in public restrooms to ensure that the occupants flush, where many people refuse to travel because it has the reputation of being the Santa Barbara of the East?

If this is your idea of Singapore, brace yourself because Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is out to change that perception with the collection of stories that she’s edited for Akashic Press, Singapore Noir. These glimpses of the Lion City will have you heading for a hot shower after you put the book down—yes, they are that dark, that gritty, that unsettling.

Singapore, Tan tells us, is a city dominated by girls, gambling, and ghosts, a product of two divergent cultures, English and Chinese.  “No Disneyland here,” she says cheerfully, “but there is a death penalty.” And then she backs up her introduction with fourteen different writers, each showing a city that should be visited in the company of body guards as well as a tour guide.

It’s probably no accident that the two mildest viewpoints are given by S.J, Rozan and Lawrence Osborne. Nonresidents themselves, they give the viewpoint of expatriates in Singapore, with Rozan’s American trailing husband falling in love with the city’s culture and Osborne’s Japanese salaryman falling in love with a tattooed lady of the night. But for those writers who live in Singapore, the darkness is absolute.

From poison to defenestration, death comes fast in these stories, which are vividly populated by debt collectors and prostitutes, rent boys and battered housemaids. They are often difficult to read, with their graphic descriptions of sex and violence. But they show a city that is eerily attractive, decadent, and dangerous. From the kelong houses on the piers to the air-conditioned shopping malls on Orchard Road, they offer a sense of place that is assured and knowledgeable beneath the layers of crime.

Macaques, mahogany trees, and street markets, the “green and ordered legacy” of colonialism, the “deathly quiet” of the city’s Nature Reserve, the sea with “shades of blue…like flowing silk,” the cadence and music of Singlish, “the swirling scents of curry, coconut milk, and coriander,” all give a gleaming luster to a city that is as clean and safe—or dark and dirty—as you might want it to be. Singapore Noir takes away the stigma of Asia Lite from the city-state by draping it in dark and sinister beauty.~Janet Brown

I

The Man with a Golden Mind by Tom Vater (Crime Wave Press)

I stayed up much too late last night, motionless on my sofa, racing my way through The Man with the Golden Mind. This morning I feel a bit groggy, still caught in Laos with one of the most attractive characters in crime fiction, Maier.

First introduced in The Cambodian Book of the Dead, Maier is a German journalist turned private detective, a man who knows Southeast Asia well. In his mid-forties, he’s “tired but not finished,” with a hard-earned reputation as an “Asia expert,” and a man who allows little to escape his green-eyed stare. Hired by beautiful Julia Rendell to discover who killed her father in rural Laos twenty-five years earlier, Maier immediately finds the job will be far from easy when his client is kidnapped soon after she retains him.

In Laos, he bumps up against past history and a dazzling panoply of international obstructions, from the well-preserved karaoke-singing Mr. Mookie, whose passion for bar-girls covers a coldblooded interior, to the Teacher, a one-legged ex-CIA  agent, crazed but still deadly, who heads the Free State of Mind in the middle of the Laos jungle. Then there’s Kanitha, who says she’s a journalist but has the mind and heart of a true killer.

As he travels through northern Laos, searching for his client and the answers she has hired him to uncover, Maier discovers strange links to a mystery of his own, as well as unexploded ordnance and hints of a lost file from the days of the American War—one that could blow the lid off modern-day alliances. When a former associate, “a gay Russian hit man,” suddenly shows up in the mix, Maier is drawn deep into a morass of nation against nation, where individual lives are valueless.

Tom Vater is a master of plot and character, which puts The Man with the Golden Mind at the top of my list of memorable crime fiction. But what keeps me reading everything this man writes is his stunning sense of place.  Bangkok, he says, is “a metropolis of ten million people who never talked to each other but smiled and smiled and smiled.” The mercilessly-bombed Plain of Jars is “a giant’s golf course” and a crisp description of “the last frontier for the Lonely Planet set” is precise, satirical, and right on target. And then there’s Maier, a man who uses only his surname—and when Vater finally explains why, readers can only sympathize.

Addiction is a pitiable state to live in. I know. I face a long, miserable withdrawal period before I spend another night with one of Tom Vater’s books, gulping down the chapters and savoring the journey that this writer always provides. Kathmandu, Cambodia, Laos…I can’t wait to see where we go next…~Janet Brown

Good Chinese Wife by Susan Blumberg-Kason

The best travel literature is written by people who live in a country, submit to its culture, and love it—warts and all. Susan Blumberg-Kason in her new memoir, Good Chinese Wife, does all of that and much more. She traveled to China, moved to Hong Kong, and fell in love with a man from a small Chinese town. And reader, she married him--and lived to tell the tale.

Few women of her time were as freshly-minted as Susan was when she went off to graduate school in pre-handover Hong Kong. Her geographic travels had probably almost filled up a passport—with a mother who worked for an airlines, Susan could, and did, hop on a plane and go anywhere she liked. An adventurous teenager, she had been to mainland China more than once, was attracted to what she saw in that newly-opened country—and she became downright besotted with Hong Kong.

And yet, in her early twenties, by the time Susan came to live in that city, she had been involved with only one serious boyfriend. With the freedom that came from living far from home, in a new country, she embarked on a couple of fleeting affairs. Then she met Cai.

He was handsome, sophisticated, an older man. Susan was a Mandarin-speaking American girl, eager and sparkling. Within a very short time, this unlikely couple fell in love, became engaged, and were married. Cai spoke English, Susan was fluent in Mandarin, but neither had the skill to plumb the other’s character as thoroughly as either of them should have. When Cai spent his wedding night in a luxurious Kowloon hotel watching porn films on pay-per-view TV, Susan didn’t ask him why. When Susan was devastated that there was no time to go to an English-language bookstore when the couple had a brief stop in Shanghai, Cai didn’t bother to discover the reason that his bride was so upset. Then there was the question of “Japanese Father,” a professor who loomed large in Cai’s regard and cast a sinister shadow on the life of the young couple from the very beginning of their marriage. In a burst of true saintliness, Susan kept her misgivings about this man to herself, even when he provided Cai with a gigantic and mysterious sum of money.

When Cai and Susan moved to San Francisco and bought a house, his parents soon followed, bringing their culture with them—and of course, Japanese Father showed up for a visit. By then, there was a baby, and Susan became a young mother as well as the primary bread-winner for her extended family.

In so many ways, this story is a heart-breaker—and yet, like the best memoirs, it takes its readers on a journey. Susan Blumberg-Kason skillfully avoids any melodramatic tinge as she unfolds her novelistic history. She shows how it was to live in Hong Kong before it became semi-autonomous, what it is to be part of a rural Chinese household, and the innermost intricacies of a very complicated marriage.

Racing through her pages, moaning in sympathy at one moment and feeling envious in the next paragraph, readers of Good Chinese Wife have to keep one thing in mind: Don’t forget to exhale during the many moments that this splendid book takes your breath away. ~Janet Brown

Shanghai Grand by Taras Grescoe (St. Martin's Press)

Emily Hahn was both a biographer’s dream and nightmare. Her restless and unconventional life is richly detailed in her memoirs, except for the few things that she deemed private. She frankly disclosed her love affair with the married British officer whom she would eventually marry, long after having a daughter with him, her flirtation with opium, and her marriage to a dashing Chinese poet, which she presents as one of convenience. What she leaves obscured is her opium addiction and her longstanding love affair with the Chinese poet, both of which began and flourished in pre-war Shanghai.

Sir Victor Sassoon, known as “the fifth or sixth richest men in the world,”  was one of Emily Hahn’s  first friends when she first arrived in Shanghai in 1935 and took up residence in his luxurious hotel, the Cathay. The third Baronet of Bombay, Sassoon was descended from Sephardic Jews who had fled Baghdad for India and increased their fortune by trading in opium and cotton. Sir Victor was raised in England, became a fighter pilot during World War I, survived a plane crash that left him a lifelong cripple, and brought $29 million dollars in silver with him when he moved to Shanghai.

Emily and Victor met in a city that was among the most modern and the most crowded in the world. Fabulous wealth rested on the labor of dirt-poor Chinese laborers; in 1935 5,950 corpses were cleared from Shanghai streets, most of them victims of starvation and disease. Meanwhile foreign businessmen were lured from depression-era America with the promise of a salary that would allow ”ten to twenty domestic servants, membership at several clubs, a houseboat, and a new Ford or Buick with a driver.”

In this city of glittering decadence and deadly poverty, Emily and Victor struck up a lasting friendship. Under his mentorship, Emily found a place to live, a job writing for the city’s leading newspaper, and the man who introduced her to opium, Zau Sinmay, whom she would love for the duration of her life in Shanghai.

A Cambridge-educated aristocrat and leader of Shanghai’s artistic community, Sinmay immediately brought his American mistress into his family circle and gave her the protection of a marriage under Chinese law, which would later save Emily in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong. The two of them became partners as well as lovers, starting several literary magazines, both in Chinese and in English. Their relationship gave Emily access to Chinese society and culture in a way no other Western woman had or even cared to have, as well as the subject for a series of stories published in the New Yorker that focused on an eccentric, worldly Chinese gentleman whom she called Mr. Pan.

The city where these three people had found each other and lived their glamorous, comfortable lives was surrounded by predatory warlords, protected by a tenuous national government, and threatened by the encroachment of the Japanese Imperial Army upon Chinese territory. By 1937, Japan’s warships were coming close and the Chinese planes sent out to attack them had instead dropped two 1,100-pound bombs on Shanghai’s wealthiest area, the International Settlement. Two more bombs rapidly followed, killing 825 people. Three days later, 600 more people died when a Chinese pilot, assailed by Japanese planes, jettisoned his load of bombs in a panic while flying over the same area of Shanghai. In the following year, Japan had encircled the city and controlled it in a puppet government.

It's a tribute to Taras Grescoe’s skill that he has managed to corral the story of three improbable people and the history of the city where they flourished in less than four hundred pages. That Grescoe also uncovered the fate of Zau Sinmay post-revolution by tracking down the surviving members of the Zau family gives his book a dimension that takes it beyond the ordinary biography. Present-day Shanghai becomes as enthralling as its 1930s counterpart as Grescoe vividly reveals its modern rebirth to become a dominant city once again in this new century.~Janet Brown