Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon (Simon & Schuster)

Isolation is a state that many of us have found ourselves in during this period of history. Whether we’re going though it alone or with our families, we’ve been sealed off from activities that in the past have made us happy—going to a library, roaming through a museum, meeting a friend for lunch, or even getting on public transit without feeling apprehensive.  

Some of us have also known the isolation that comes from spending long periods of time in another country where we don’t speak the language and where we sometimes take refuge in memories of a world where once we were understood. But what happens if we find our memories too painful to revisit for more than a moment or two? Where to go then?

When Yohan disembarks from a ship on which he was the only passenger, he leaves behind the sailors from his country with whom he exchanges goodbyes in Korean, “not knowing when he would ever hear it again.” He enters a place that’s filled with a warmth he’s never felt in his life, bringing with him only a letter of introduction to a man he’s never met, and an umbrella tossed to him by a girl he’s never seen before, a gift of silent welcome as he walks into a new world.

Yohan, still young, has come from two years spent in an American prison camp in South Korea, leaving it a year after the war ended. Refusing repatriation to the Northern mountain village that once was his home, he’s sent to Brazil with the basic skills he learned while he was imprisoned, “mending the clothes of the dead.”. 

Working with Kiyoshi, a Japanese tailor who has already gone through the process of “adjusting to a foreign rhythm...pretending to understand,” Yohan is quiet, doing simple tasks and exploring his new city while running errands for the tailor shop. He avoids memories--of finding his childhood friend Peng on a military train, of guiding him through the prison camp after Peng is blinded in battle, of watching his only friend release his hold on life and float away while the two of them are taking baths in a treacherous campside river. 

He vividly sees himself on the train with Peng, glimpsing a family who rummages through devastated houses, burrows into a field of frozen wreckage and emerges with their hands cold, glistening, and seemingly empty. “Snow hunters,” Peng says, as the train carries the boys away from a world that will never belong to them again.

Slowly Yohan gains his footing in this new country, learning enough words to guide him into friendships where he can exist with minimal speech: with Kiyoshi, with Peixe,a crippled man who tends the city’s cemetery, and with a boy and a girl, Santi and Bia, two youthful nomads who have only each other, who vanish without explanation but always return.  Bia is the girl who tossed him “the gift of an umbrella in the morning rain,” a present that Yohan keeps while slowly becoming part of this foreign place through the companionship of other outsiders. With one question of three short syllables, he finally abandons his memories of empty snow, his life lived in the present tense, and “enters the future.”

Snow Hunters is a gift that shows how isolation can melt away through the acceptance of a new way of life. Its quiet poetic language and delicate celebration of small pleasures are enhanced by an unlikely and tentative love story, giving hope to anyone lucky enough to read Paul Yoon’s wise and reassuring masterpiece.~Janet Brown

The Chrysanthemum and the Fish by Howard Hebbitt (Kodansha)

Trying to understand the humor of a country whose language you don’t share can be close to impossible. Even if you have studied the language for years, the use of slang, puns, and plays on words may be hard to understand but Howard Hibbett has decided to take on this monstrous task by giving us a history lesson in Japanese Humor going all the way back to the seventh century and working his way up to the Tokugawa Era in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Arthur Koestler, who wrote about humor in the Encyclopaedia Britannica said, “the humour of the Japanese is astonishingly mild and poetic, “like weak, mint-flavoured tea.” In contrast to what Koestler said, Hibbet shows how Japanese humor can be just as ribald and funny as any other nations in his book The Chrysanthemum and the Fish.

Hibbett begins his treatise by talking about “cheerful vulgarity” from an early episode in the Kojiki which translates to “An Account of Ancient Matters”. It is cited as Japan’s oldest literary work and includes stories, myths, legends, songs, oral traditions and more. One of the earliest episodes of laughter and humor is related in “Amaterasu and the Cave”

Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, has a quarrel with her younger brother Susano’o and hides herself in a cave thus depriving the world of light and plunging it into darkness. It was Ama-no-Uzume, the Goddess of Mirth who was able to attract her out of the cave. She did this by turning over a tub and started dancing on it and tearing off her clothes in front of the other kami (deities) who laughed so loud that Amaterasu was drawn out of her cave. Hibbett makes the argument that this episode “illustrates the link between laughter, religion, and regeneration.”

Hibbett continues to inform us of the evolution of humor from the Kojiki to the early humor in rural villages which are said to be “uninhibitedly coarse”. “Fleas, farts, barnyard sex, and other inelegant themes are among the usual topics of these artless stories.” The village humor would be akin to the American “dirty jokes”. 

The myths and humorous stories would give rise to rakugo in the 9th and 10th centuries. Rakugo is a form of verbal entertainment which was invented by monks to make their sermons more fun and appealing. A rakugoka, a lone storyteller sits on a cushion and relates a long and comical story between two or more characters using only the tone and pitch of his voice and a slight turn of his head to depict the differences in who’s speaking.

The Edo Era would introduce gesaku, a term used for “playful writing” and many of the books originated in the Yoshiwara District, the Pleasure Quarters during this time.The books satirized brothel society often making fun of the samurai who would frequent the area. Also spawning from the Yoshiwara District were these witty adult comic books called kibyoshi or “yellowbacks”. “Yellowbacks combined text and illustrations in almost equal proportion - to satirize the manners and morals of the day.”

Japanese humor is still alive and well in the 21st century. Many Japanese comedians have been able to translate their jokes and stories into English and have performed abroad without embarrassment. Even if some things get lost in translation, the comedians can laugh off the misunderstandings. As the old English proverb goes, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you.” ~Ernie Hoyt

Chasing Hepburn by Gus Lee (Harmony Books, Random House)

There are some books that are meant to be inhabited, read again and again over the years in order to live a certain kind of life that can be found only in their pages.  They defy being placed in a cage of words built by a review. They range too wide, are too rich, and are so vivid that they take up residence in the personal world of their readers. 

This is the sort of book that Chasing Hepburn is, the story of a vanished China, a family history, and a love letter to a woman who was as indomitable as she appeared to be fragile. Gus Lee knew his mother for only a short time in his life. He’s made up for that loss by mining every memory of her that he could find, to build a portrait of her that is impossible to turn away from, or to forget.

Da-tsien was a brilliant beauty with big feet, a legacy from her father who refused to let them be bound into stubs. Her mother saw this as a barrier to her daughter’s successful marriage in the future but without her father’s interference, Da-tsien would never have saved her family during the turmoil and danger of wartime China. It’s possible she never would have realized her greatest dream--to have a son. 

“She was a dreamer who fell in love with a rogue,” Lee says, and throughout Chasing Hepburn, it’s clear where his sympathies lie. He loves the girl who escapes from her chaperone to ride on the back of a wild boy’s motorcycle in Shanghai of the 1920’s, who chooses someone who’s friends with both a son of the powerful Soong family and one of the city’s leading gangsters, and who marries him in spite of objections from family--both his and hers. Zee Zee and Da-tsien are bound together for life, although she is forced to share him with his other passions--flying planes in warfare and his obsession with the American actress, Katharine Hepburn, whom Da-tsien also admires. 

Their marriage is more like a tempestuous love affair, marked by separations dictated by the history of their time. Zee Zee is a restless warrior fighting against the Communist forces that Chiang Kai-shek battles, Da-tsien has become a woman whose flair for adventure is temporarily quenched by giving birth to daughters while she yearns for a son.  Her inner flame is never extinguished by maternity; it lies dormant until Shanghai is invaded by the Japanese and Da-tsien, alone, sets off with her daughters on an odyssey across war-time China to reach her husband who has been sent to America.

On her over-sized feet, with her unflagging courage, she brings her children to safety and to her husband who has in his absence gone to Hollywood as a Chinese war hero. Feted and praised, he has realized a dream. He has met and fallen in unrequited love with Katharine Hepburn while his wife and children journey through war and peril to reach him. 

This is not Da-tsien’s happy ending. This comes later, when she finally gives birth to the son who will bring her and her story to the world of readers.

Although Lee gives short shrift to his father, Zee Zee becomes almost as irresistible as Da-tsien, even when he turns into a domestic tyrant in the family’s American home. Falling in love with Amy Tan’s legendary mother , Daisy, long after Da-tsien’s death, the two of them travel together to China where they’re forced to pretend they’re married in order to sleep in the same bed. “We do things ” Daisy tells her daughter, “that you haven’t even heard of.” But it is the spirit of Da-tsien that Zee Zee  welcomes to his bedside as he lies dying at the age of ninety-one and it is Zee Zee who gives his son the stories of Da-tsien as a rebellious girl and a woman who loved a difficult man with all of her fierce heart.

Lee has the incomparable gift of interlacing China’s history with the love story of his parents, making Chou Enlai, T.V. Soong, and Shanghai’s notorious member of the Green Gang, Pan-da come alive on the page, evoking admiration and sorrow. Chasing Hepburn is a book that can easily become an addiction of the best kind.~Janet Brown

In the Cities of the South : Scenes from a Developing World by Jeremy Seabrook (Verso)

Slum - the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “a densely populated usually urban area marked by crowding, run-down housing, poverty, and social disorganization.” The word conjures up images of the shantytowns of Johannesburg, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and even the ghettos of almost any large city in the U.S.  It is often believed to be a haven for criminals and gang members, where disease and pestilence run rampant. 

Jeremy Seabrook has compiled a book on the expanding cities of South Asia including Bangkok, Bombay (Mumbai), Dhaka, Manila, Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh and Kuala Lumpur. The cities and their governments are experiencing a trend in industrialization and urbanization which is also the leading cause of creating the slums. This has all been done in the name of development. 

Seabrook focuses on the people’s daily lives who live in these less than ideal habitats.The slum-dwellers are often depicted as dirty, worthless, idle alcoholics and prostitutes who do not contribute anything to society. In the Cities of the South shows that not all slum dwellers are the scourge of society nor are all slums dangerous as Western media portrays them as many of the inhabitants come from the same rural areas and find a sort of comfort and sense of security with each other. 

Many of the people who live in the slums come to the city seeking jobs because they cannot make a living in the country. Traditional occupations like fishing and farming have become impossible as the land gets developed for a consumer society. The people have no choice but to move into the city because they cannot feed their families and the only opportunity to make money is in the city.

In Bombay, Seabrook talks to the people who live in Dharavi, one of the biggest slums in the world. The Prime Minister’s Grand Project was to replace much of the slum housing with multistorey apartment blocks. “The people who lived in the jopris (huts) were promised they would be given the first option to buy the flats that were to be constructed on the site of their then houses.” 

Unfortunately, the reality is far from what they expected. There are approximately 600,000 people living in Dharavi. The apartments were completed but were a lot less than the original plan and the space was much smaller than then huts that were demolished. It also cost twice as much then was originally quoted so many of the people were worse off than before. 

Seabrook often makes comparisons to the expanding cities of South Asia with the industrialization of his native U.K. The rampant corruption of government officials, the use of child-labor, the influx of multi-nationals - all in the name of progress and development. Unfortunately, the only aspect of progress not taken into consideration is the human factor.

Who are we as Westerners to criticize the Third World countries in their desire to become more developed. We should not make assumptions about the people who live in the slums. Many are not there because they want to be, they just had nowhere else to go. Seabrook manages to give these people a voice to show us that they are human just like us and are only struggling to survive. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Magical Language of Others by E.J. Koh (Tin House Books)

Eun Ji Koh, California-born with Korean parents, is steeped in different languages from the very beginning of her life. Her father’s mother, who cared for her when she was small, came from Korea but had been born in Japan and lived there for her first decade. Although Koh hears her grandmother speak Japanese when they’re at a Japanese shopping center, she herself learns only a smattering of words in that language; her grandmother wants to “secure me with English.” Much later, long after that grandmother died, Koh learns from a DNA test that she herself is part Japanese, a fact to which her parents claim ignorance, speculating that perhaps this came from “a violence we didn’t know about.” But Koh, even before discovering this part of her heritage, plunges into total immersion at an international language program in Japan. At seventeen, she absorbs Japanese as though she’s trying to reclaim the grandmother who loved her. By the end of the summer, her teacher is in tears. “Who will talk to you in Japanese again...you will look for it everywhere, anywhere you go. Your hunger will teach you what you’ve lost.”

But Koh has already learned the language of loss and hunger, cloaked in letters written in Korean, the simple version that’s all she understands. When she is fourteen, her father takes a high-paying job in Seoul. He finds a comfortable house for his children to live in and then flies away with his wife, believing “it was better to pay for your children than to stay with them.” Koh, who just recently has entered adolescence is now under the care of her nineteen-year-old brother. Her parents would not return to the US. for seven years.

Every week Koh’s mother sends her a letter, using the Korean that she hopes her daughter will understand, “kiddie diction,” flecked with bits of English to help clarify her messages. They veer from the maternal to the childlike and in them Koh is addressed as a daughter and as her mother’s parent, reflecting the “Korean belief that you are born the parent of the one you hurt most.” Koh’s way of delivering pain is silence. Although she speaks to her mother on the phone, she never replies to these letters.

In college at a poetry workshop, Koh discovers another language. On her second class she hands her teacher forty poems that she had written the night before, poetry about her mother. Her teacher responds with “I wish I could do that,” and then after reading them, “There’s no magnanimity.” Another poet tells her to be “relentlessly forgiving...choose love” in her poetry and in acquiring this new language, Koh’s life takes on a deeper dimension. She learns the “difference between having a life and being a life.” She translates her mother’s letters into English, faces the truth of her abandonment, and then faces her parents when they finally return to the U.S.

Koh’s poetry breaches the surface of her memoir in stunning sentences and her blazing honesty vouchsafes details that are both painful and evocative. This is a book that will break hearts and then put them back together, piece by piece. 

“Languages, as they open you, can also allow you to close,” Koh says. In this beautiful book, she proves that language can also reopen its users after it has closed them, and lead them into gleaming new landscapes of pleasure and clarity.~Janet Brown

The Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill (Soho Crime)

The Coroner’s Lunch by Colin Cotterill is the first book in a mystery series set in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic in the late seventies when the communist Pathet Lao took power. The story features a seventy-two year old man with bright green eyes named Dr. Siri Paiboun. He is a forty-six year member of the Communist Party and is also a surgeon. Comrade Kham, a high-level government bureaucrat, tells Siri that he has been appointed chief police coroner...of the entire country - a position he could not refuse even though he has never done an autopsy in his life. 

Siri’s assistant, Geung, a young man who has Down’s Syndrome, informs that Comrade Kham’s wife is waiting for him at the morgue. She is described as a “senior cadre at the Women’s Union and carried as much weight politically as she did structurally.” What Geung fails to tell him though is that Mrs. Kham is in the freezer. Dr. Siri’s nurse, Dtui tells him that she was brought in because she died an unnatural death. 

Senior Comrade Kham had already been informed of his wife’s death and came to the morgue the next day. Kham was confident about the cause of death. He told Siri that his wife was addicted to lahp, a dish that is often made with raw meat. Dr. Siri says he cannot issue a death certificate until he can confirm that the cause of death was by parasites. Comrade Kham said that isn’t necessary as he had her own surgeon already sign it. 

Siri begins to suspect foul play when Senior Comrade Kham rushes to have the body cremated and goes as far as saying, “Even a man of science needs to show sensitivity to culture and religion” as the Comrade Kham was a member of the committee that outlawed Buddhism as a state religion and banned the giving of alms to monks. 

A group of men came into the morgue bringing a coffin to remove Mrs. Kham’s body. This is when Siri sees an ominous shadow of a figure behind the men who has a striking resemblance to Mrs. Kham. He saw the outline of Mrs. Kham run at Comrade Kham with full force with a look of hatred but vanished when she hit him making Comrade Kham shudder with a sudden chill. 

Fortunately, Siri still had Mrs. Kham’s brain setting in formalin. He knew he should leave it alone but his scientific mind wouldn’t let it rest. What if Mrs. Kham had been poisoned or worse yet, what if she had been murdered? And recently there have been three other deaths by unnatural causes and it appears that Comrade Kham may have had something to do with that as well. 

Cotterill weaves an engaging story with characters you can care for. He blends the tale with a good dose of humor and action and adds a bit of shamanism and spirits into the picture as well. The government and people really come to life and leave you wanting more. Fortunately, there are fourteen more titles in the series! ~Ernie Hoyt

Travels with Myself and Another: A Memoir by Martha Gellhorn (Penguin)

Martha Gellhorn was an indefatigable writer, producing five novels, fourteen novellas, two collections of short stories, and a lifetime of reportage which has been reprinted in The Face of War and The View from the Ground. Although her life was full of glamour and adventure, Gellhorn rarely wrote about herself, except in a book that has redefined travel writing, Travels with Myself and Another. Even though Paul Theroux outdoes her in output, Gellhorn would dismiss him as one of “the great travelers who have every impressive qualification for the job but lack jokes.”

Many things infuriated Gellhorn--injustice, cruelty, stupidity--but on a personal level, nothing made her more incensed than having her name linked with that of the man she was married for less than five of her almost ninety years, Ernest Hemingway. Although Travels with Myself and Another is subtitled as a memoir, the most famous of her three husbands appears in just one essay under the initials of U.C. (Unwilling Companion), probably only because he provides extensive comic relief for a writer “who cherishes...disasters” and is immensely fond of black humor.

Gellhorn relishes mishaps in her journeys because that is where the story lies--and since her journeys are invariably far off the map, mishaps are always there, waiting for her acerbic descriptions. 

Of all the travels that she has chosen to relive, her journey to China in 1941 is easily the most hair-raising and hysterically funny. Gellhorn is determined to witness the Sino-Japanese War first-hand shortly after Japan joins Italy and Germany in the Axis. “All I had to do is get to China,” she says blithely, and as part of her preparations for this odyssey she persuades U.C. to go with her. Embarking from San Francisco to Honolulu by ship, a voyage that “lasted roughly forever,” Gellhorn and U.C. then fly from Hawaii to Hong Kong, “all day in roomy comfort”, landing at an island where passengers spend the night before arriving in Hong Kong. “Air travel,” she says, “was not always disgusting.”

Not a woman who prefers to wallow in luxury, Gellhorn is soon flying out of Hong Kong into China “at 4:30 am in a high wind in a DC2,” part of China National Aviation Company’s fleet, which Gellhorn describes as “flying beetles.” “Cold to frozen,” she returns three nights later to the comfort of the hotel where U.C. holds court. Gellhorn spends her days exploring Hong Kong’s “cruel poverty, the worst I had ever seen,” visiting opium dens, brothels, child-labor sweat shops, and meeting Emily Hahn (“with cigar and highly savvy on the Orient”) and Madame Sun Yat Sen (“tiny and adorable and admirable”).

As a war correspondent for Collier’s, Gellhorn insists upon getting as close to the war as she can. Traveling by plane, truck, boat, and “awful little horses”, she and U.C. find the troops of the Chinese Army and their hard-drinking generals (who almost vanquish U.C. in their alcoholic prowess), Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang  (“who,” Gellhorn fumes, “ was charming to U.C. and civil to me”), and, through a cloak-and-dagger encounter in a Chungking market, Chou Enlai (“this entrancing man,” Gellhorn confesses, “the one really good man we’d met in China”).

Although she and U.C. barely escape cholera, hypothermia, food poisoning, and the hazards of drinking snake wine, by the end of their journey Gellhorn contracts a vicious case of “China Rot,” an ailment resembling athlete’s foot that’s highly contagious. U.C.’s commiseration is heartwarming: “Honest to God, M., you brought this on yourself. I told you not to wash.”

On their last night, hot and steaming in the humidity of Rangoon, Gellhorn is overwhelmed with gratitude that U.C. has stuck with her through “a season in hell.” She reaches out, touches his shoulder, and murmurs her thanks, “while he wrenched away, shouting “Take your filthy dirty hands off me!” “We looked at each other, laughing in our separate pools of sweat.”

“The real life of the East is agony to watch and horror to share,” Gellhorn wrote somewhat melodramatically to her mother. Years later, she concludes “I was right about one thing; in the Orient a world ended.” From Gellhorn’s sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued point of view, that ending was nothing to mourn.~Janet Brown

The Crocodile Fury by Beth Yahp (Angus & Robertson)

The Crocodile Fury is Beth Yahp’s first novel and is set in her native Malaysia. It is the story of three generations of women - the grandmother who was a bonded-servant to a rich man and worked at his mansion before it was converted into a convent, the mother who works in the convent’s laundry room, and the girl who narrates the story. 

The narrator has spent most of her life in the convent. “The convent is on a hill on the edge of the city, next to a jungle reserve which swallows and spits out trucks full of soldiers every day.” This is where the narrator begins her story. She also talks about the tribe of monkeys led by a one-armed bandit who often leads raids into the kitchen of the convent to steal food. 

It is the convent where the parents of the wealthy and the poor send their girls. “Young girls are brought in who are too noisy or boisterous or too bossy or unladylike or too disobedient or worldly, or merely too hard to look at, or feed.” The homely girls are taught to sew and weave while the noisy, boisterous girls are taught to become honest, obedient and humble young ladies. 

The narrator is a charity student. The narrator was raised mostly by her grandmother. She tells us that her grandmother believes in ghosts and demons.  “She is old now, so sometimes she mixes them up. When she was younger she had an extra eye.” When the narrator asks her grandmother, “Where? Where?” Her grandmother tells her she can never be sure. Her grandmother’s extra eye “suddenly opened when she was hit on the head with a frying-pan ladle.” This gave her the power to see the demons and spirits and the ability to talk to the dead. 

Yahp’s prose flows smoothly and is a delight to read as she makes the jungle surrounding the convent come alive but the story itself goes all over the place. At times, it is very difficult to follow as the narrator will talk about her grandmother, then her mother, then about herself and back to her mother or grandmother making it hard to follow the chronology of events. It is also difficult to feel any empathy towards the characters. 

The grandmother comes off as demanding and unforgiving. The narrator with her repetitious pronouncements about her mother “before she was a Christian” was irritating at best. In fact, all the characters seem to be caricatures of people as none of them are given any names. They are only known as grandmother, mother, the bully, the rich man, the lover, the lizard boy and so on. 

The story is told with a blend of spiritualism, mysticism and the mundane so you can never be sure if the narrator is telling a true story or is just remembering a dream she had or a vision her grandmother saw. 

And the “crocodile fury”? The crocodile is a metaphor for man and his hunger to satisfy his lust for power and love. The fury is when the “crocodiles” cannot contain their own anger. All in all, the descriptive depiction of the convent and the characters that pass through there make for a story that is at once confusing and beautiful at the same time. ~Ernie Hoyt