The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara (W.W. Norton & Company)

Born with his eyes wide open to a mother who died soon after his birth and a father who is disliked even by his own family, the ugly new baby needs an advantage and his stepmother provides it. Raj, she calls him, and his educated uncle gives the name its English translation, King.

King Rao is “a big name for a little runt,” his family says, but within a matter of years the boy lives up to it. Through cleverness and chicanery his grandfather became owner of a coconut farm, even though he is a Dalit, one of the Untouchables. King Rao is the smartest of the grandchildren and he’s told often that someday Rao’s Garden will belong to him. 

This never happens. King Rao is sent to school, moves on to a university, and is sent to the U.S. for graduate school. Out of a village that is “a hot wet nothing,” comes a man who will change the world and will ultimately preside over it. 

Already known as a programming genius in India, in the U.S. King Rao becomes a software programmer who makes personal computers a staple in every household. He learns how to collect and use data in a way that gives him unprecedented power. When nationalism threatens to destroy the world, he presents his plan: Shareholder Government that unites every country and is guided by the Master Algorithm. “Algo” makes decisions based on the data provided by the Social Profiles that every Shareholder, as in every person on earth, has from birth. The most successful Shareholders sit on the Board of Corporations and the chairman of the board is King Rao, a man who has taken on the status of a god but who is human enough to fall.

It’s his own mind that’s to blame for his ouster. King Rao has developed a means to connect human brains to the Internet but fails to realize that old brains no longer have the plasticity to make this happen. People die, King Rao evades responsibility, and a revolution is averted only by his voluntary exile.

Although this may sound like a run of the mill dystopian novel, Vauhini Vara isn’t the sort of writer to follow that path. She’s braided together three separate strands that take their turns in forming an intricate and diabolically clever plot. Life on the coconut farm with its traditions and inevitable dissolution continually alternates with King Rao’s rise, success, and eventual dethronement in the outside world, and then lapses into the idyllic life he shares with his young daughter on a lonely island. 

Once again hubris gets in the way. King Rao has given his daughter the Internet connection that once led to his downfall but even more dangerously, he has devised a way to filter his mind into hers. Not only is Athena constantly deluged with the Internet, she’s also a receptacle for her father’s brain--his thoughts, his memories, his consciousness. As all this flows into her,  King Rao quite literally begins to lose his mind.

Athena escapes, but with a terrible and inescapable knowledge. Like the system it toppled, Shareholder Government is based on consumption which has brought the planet to Hothouse Earth. Ever-increasing temperatures will destroy the world in a few generations unless corporate greed is stopped. She’s also the only one who knows that King Rao is not immortal.

Vara has constructed a heart-wrenching tragedy that has nothing to do with her human characters. It’s the beauty of the world, in Rao’s Garden and on the dreamlike island that demands our love and grief. “The sun, spraying its sweet, glittering light;” the intricate white lace that covers the world and enchanted an astronaut when he viewed the earth’s clouds from outer space; the beauty of an island that has been reclaimed by forests and fields of ferns that reach shoulder-high, where raccoons and deer have no reason to be afraid; a Garden with a thousand trees, each one of them a source of food. 

The Immortal King Rao holds too many facets of contemporary life to be seen only as a novel. Vara, who was once a technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal and then business editor of The New Yorker, isn’t just an astute observer. She’s put the pieces together in a way that feels uncomfortably like a prophecy—and a tragedy. This is a book that will keep you awake at night, staring into the dark and looking for answers.~Janet Brown

The Dragon Hunt : Five Stories by Tran Vu, translated by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong (Hyperion]

The Dragon Hunt Is a collection of five short stories, some of which are based upon the life of writer Tran Vu. The stories were translated from the Vietnamese language by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong. A couple of the stories have previously been published in other periodicals. 

The lead story, The Coral Reef, was first published in Granta: Fifty in the summer of 1995. The second story in the collection, Gunboat on the Yangtze is a slightly altered translation that first appeared in the anthology Night, Again : Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam which was published by Seven Stories Press in 1996. 

The Coral Reef is about a boat full of refugees that runs aground on a coral reef. The crew and passengers do their best to free the boat from the reef but their efforts seem to be in vain. After the first day of being stranded, there are already changes in the people as they scramble to find food and provisions from the wreckage and think only of their own survival. 

The Coral Reef was based on an incident in Tran Vu’s life. Tran was born in Saigon in 1962. When he was sixteen, he and his older brother fled Vietnam on a boat. The war was over but the siblings didn’t feel safe with the communist government. Their boat, filled with four hundred passengers, was shipwrecked on a coral reef. 

Tran escaped through a porthole and survived in the ocean for ten days, thanks to the life jacket that was given to him by his mother, who stayed in Vietnam. He was a refugee in the Philippines until he was granted asylum in France where he currently lives. 

Gunboat on the Yangtze is a disturbing story about a disfigured boy named Toan, and his elder sister who currently live in a small house in Paris. The boy suffers from extreme loneliness so his sister promises to find him a girlfriend. Once Elder Sister’s friend sees Little Brother’s face, she screams and storms out of the house, yelling for help. Even after leaving the house, “her ghoulish scream haunted the corridor for a long time.”

Elder Sister gives in to her brother’s demand about being loved and they start an incestuous relationship. Things get a bit more complicated when Toan says he wants to have a child of his own. What happens between them defies the imagination.

Hoi An is the setting for a love triangle between a married woman, a servant girl, and the man who lives in the same house with the married woman, although in a different rented room. Hoi An is a small forgotten town in central Vietnam. The married woman’s husband is an archeologist and has moved his family to Hoi An to continue his research into the Cham and Sa Huynh people. The husband seems to be oblivious of his wife’s actions which makes her bold and dangerous at the same time. 

Nha Nam is a story where Vu mimics the style of a well-known Vietnamese writer named Nguyen Huy Thiep. Vu’s story was inspired by Thiep’s Nha Nam Rain, but Vu points out that the two stories have nothing in common besides their titles. Vu says that Nha Nam translates to Delicate South and is both ancient Vietnam and the Vietnam of today.

The final story which the book takes its name from is about a group of Vietnamese exiles who gather together in a European nation to kill dragons and eat their flesh. In Vu’s notes he mentions The Dragon Hunt is a metaphor for the divide between North and South of Vietnam, not in the sense of a nation, but as a people. It’s the difference between those who remained in the country and those who left. 

This book is a good introduction to contemporary Vietnamese fiction. Vu’s own experiences add to the realism of his stories. Although a very short book, it will impress you enough to want more. ~Ernie Hoyt

Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road by Kate Harris (HarperCollins Publishers)

Kate Harris, like many of us, was struck by wanderlust at an early age. Marco Polo became her role model and even after she realized his explorations were prompted by commercialism and not adventure, she still longed to imitate his journey. However she became terrified that the world had become too settled to satisfy her desire for wild travel and at seventeen sent letters to every leading political figure of the time, pleading her case for a human mission to Mars. She of course planned to be in that spacecraft. 

Nowhere on earth meets her stern criteria for untouched wilderness until she stands on an Alaskan glacier in the Juneau Icefield. Going back to the trail set by Marco Polo, she discovers Fanny Bullock Workman, an early 20th Century traveler who reached the Siachen Glacier, once part of Tibet and now claimed by Kashmir. Still an unvisited piece of the world, due to the military dispute between India and Pakistan, this glacier claims Harris’s imagination. It becomes the subject of her master’s thesis and eventually sends her off on a bicycle in the company of a childhood friend, following Marco Polo along the Silk Road. Her goal is the Siachen Glacier, along a route that will take her from Turkey through the Middle East and into China, Tibet, Nepal, and India.

There’s something about bicycle travel that lends itself to travel literature. The boozy old Irishwoman Dervla Murphy wrote a whole library shelf full of books about her cycling around the undeveloped world. Andrew Pham launched his writing career with Catfish and Mandala, his emotional rediscovery of his native Vietnam on a bicycle. Barbara Savage’s Miles from Nowhere has become a travel classic, telling how she and her husband spent two years traveling around the world on their bikes. Lands of Lost Borders is different from any of its predecessors, however. Although Harris disdains Henry Thoreau, her book is much like one he would have written, had he ever pulled himself out of Concord.

Anyone who travels across countries by bicycle is an athlete. Harris takes that part of herself for granted. Instead she gives voice to her wide-ranging intellect. She’s a scientist, a historian, and a poet which makes this book a constant source of surprise. She’s a risk-taker, who happily crawls under a border fence into another country when she lacks the appropriate papers for a conventional entry. She’s also a very young woman with a tinge of bitchiness, an occasional lapse into whining, and a generous helping of humor. One of her heroes, Alexandra David Neel, would have loved her. 

“Fat grey birds scattered,,,like a toss of ball bearings…Clouds pinched the sky,” Harris says of the first moments of her journey. In Georgia, she looks at Mount Ararat and sees it as “less an upheaval of rock than a cold clump of stars.” She finds a vital link between environmental protection and trophy hunting—”Putting a price tag on wilderness can pay off.” And the farther she rides, the more she agrees with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s statement, “Nationalism is babyishness for the most part.”

Linking the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk to bicycling over the Caucasus Mountains isn’t far-fetched. Wilbur and Orville were avid cyclists before they developed their first plane and icy slopes occasionally send Harris and her companion into short flights that end in crashes. As they cycle into spring, the theme of her journey becomes clear to Harris:”No road was long enough to learn all I wanted to know and get where I wanted to go.” She learns to be tolerant of Polo’s unadventurous pragmatism since she is “so privileged, so assiduously comfortable that risk and hardship hold rapturous appeal.” Even so, as she crosses Uzbekistan’s desert, sleeping during the day and traveling after dark, she understands why “the Uzbek language has no word for fun.”

In Tibet they meet two elderly pilgrims who are crawling down a highway to reach Lhasa, their knees and arms protected with thick cloth but their foreheads sporting a thick callus “like a third eye.” In Nepal, the Buddha becomes an omnipresent entity after the cyclists pass through Lumbini. Any mystical connection is broken when Harris sees Siddhartha emblazoned everywhere on shop signs and wonders what he would think of the Siddhartha Internet Cafe. 

She’s too much a scientist to dabble in mysticism but her observations of the natural world come close to that of the “absolute unmixed attention” that Simone Weil called prayer. And in the end, Harris concludes that her goal was never “a place to reach to reach, but a reason to go.” She now lives near the Canadian-Alaskan border, not too far from the Juneau Icefield that had first satisfied her hunger for wilderness. With any luck, someday she’ll write about that—an adventure in which she stays in one place.~Janet Brown

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Granta)

In Sayaka Murata’s previous novel, Convenience Store Woman, (Asia by the Book, March 2018) the main character feels like she doesn’t fit into society and doesn’t understand why people won’t leave her alone. Now, in Earthlings, her second book to be published in English and translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, she has taken the subject of “fitting in” to an extreme as Natsuki, the main character, does her best to be a functioning part of society. 

However, readers should be warned that this is definitely a title that should not be judged by its cover. The image of the cute stuffed doll may have one imagining that this might be a heartwarming fantasy about an alien stranded on earth, like E.T., who just wants to go home. The reader would be so far off the mark and may be disappointed to find out that Sayaka Murata’s world is not that simple. Her world is much darker and more real than any fantasy. 

As a child, Natsuki thought she was an alien. She believes that she is a wizard and has magic powers, given to her by a stuffed animal she bought with her New Year’s money when she was just six. Her special friend is called Piyyut. She’s now eleven but still believes she is a magician,  “a real one with actual magical powers.” 

Every summer, Natsuki and her family leave their home in Chiba and go visit her grandparent’s home in the fictitious town of Akishina, located high up in the mountains of the Southern Alps. Along with Piyyut, she carries an origami magic wand and a magical transformation mirror in her bag. 

Piyyut is from the Planet Popinbopopia. “The Magic Police had found out that Earth was facing a crisis and had sent him on a mission to save our planet.” By now, we can either believe that Natsuki really does have magical powers or that she just has an extremely active imagination. It’s also hard to determine if Piyyut is just a stuffed animal that doesn’t say anything or if he really is an alien, come to help save the earth.

The only one who knows her secret is her cousin Yuu who lives in Yamagata. Summer is the only time when they meet. Natsuki calls him her boyfriend. They made a pledge to each other when they were nine. Yuu shares with Natsuki his own secret, telling her that he is also an alien. 

After returning to Chiba one summer and going back to cram school, Natsuki has an experience that will affect her for the rest of her life. She is molested by her teacher, a teacher who is popular among students. She once tries to tell her mother about the incident but her mother won’t listen.

The following summer, the family is once again in Akishina. Natsuki is happy because she will see her boyfriend who is also her cousin (of course their parents and relatives don’t know about their relationship). Unfortunately for Natsuki and Yuu, they are caught having sex together the night before Natsuki’s family is to return to Chiba. 

The book then goes twenty three years into the future. Natsuki is now a housewife. However her marriage is a marriage of convenience. Her husband is desperately trying to escape society while Natsuki hopes to become a “tool for the Factory”, meaning she hopes to be able to be a “baby factory” because that’s what society expects for women. Her husband thinks otherwise. 

Natsuki’s husband convinces her to take him to Akishina since he’s heard so much about it. The family feels it might not be the best timing as Yuu is currently living in the house. After the two were caught together, both families had refused to let them see or talk to each other. It was now twenty-three years since that incident. 

Will Natsuki’s husband be in shock if he learns about their secret? Does Yuu remember the promises they made as children? And will Natsuki become a “tool for the Factory” to produce “humans connected by flesh and blood”? 

Sayaka Murata’s new world in Earthlings is not for the weak of heart. She deals with a lot of taboo subjects—incest, rape, murder, violence, cannibalism, secrets, and spins it into a story that will stay with you long after you have finished reading it. I’m still not sure if Natsuki was an alien to begin with, like she said! ~Ernie Hoyt

The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng (Riverhead Books)

At first only a small boy is able to find the islands. Ah Boon is on his father’s fishing boat when the first island appears, with its bounty of fish that will bring financial stability without effort. Elusive and mysterious, the island is gone when the next trip to it takes place, reappearing only when Ah Boon is on the boat to search for it. It turns out to be one of several islands, never before seen by the small village of fisherman who profit from this discovery. 

Money from the steady crop of fish sends Ah Boon to school, an unusual step for a child raised in a kampong, one of the many villages at the edge of the sea, surrounded by mangrove trees. There he meets Siok Mei, a spirited, smart orphan from the kampong.

Their friendship becomes a fiercely loyal one, even when politics drives a wedge between them. Siok Mei becomes a Communist activist while Ah Boon finds an opportunity to join the Gah Men, British-educated Chinese from the city who find an economic goldmine in the mangrove swamps on the coast. First lured by the air-conditioned coolness and the television set in the newly built community center that has been built in the kampong, the villagers begin to understand that a more comfortable life exists outside of what they’ve always known. When Ah Boon tells them about the apartments that will soon be built nearby, ones with electricity, plumbing, bathrooms, and refrigerators, slowly they abandon their fishing village for these newfound luxuries and the construction equipment moves in. 

Singapore, the island they live on, needs more land. To get it, the Gah Men remove the mangroves, fill in the swamp, and extend Singapore into the sea. The kampongs disappear, the fishermen who live in high-rise buildings lose their livelihood, and Communism becomes a threat to be eradicated. Ah Boon and Siok Mei are on separate and dangerous pathways but their friendship pulls them together again.

Rachel Heng juxtaposes a mythic way of life against the hard truths of history, taking her characters from 1941 into the Japanese occupation from 1942-1945 and up to Singapore’s independence from Great Britain and its short-lived merger with Malaysia. The Great Reclamation shows how Singapore stamped out kampong culture in the service of its expansion, an act that would lead to the island eventually increasing its land mass by 22%. Since 1965, Singapore has gone from 227 square miles to 277 square miles and plans to reclaim another 38 by 2030, bringing it to over 300. In the process people who have traditionally been rooted to the seacoast are now far from it, suspended in buildings that keep their feet from touching the earth.

Rachel Heng’s characters are all servants of this history, each of them representing a fragment of Singapore’s past. None of them go much beyond this and the tragedy that engulfs them seems pallid as a result. It’s the kampong that’s given vivid life with descriptions that are bound to make readers mourn its disappearance--and when the enigmatic islands become threatened, this has more resonance than what takes place between Ah Boon and Siok Mei. 

This is a fine introduction to Singapore’s modern history but as a novel it falls short. Rarely does fiction cry out for a timeline but this book definitely does.~Janet Brown

The Windfall by Diksha Basu (Crown)

What happens when a middle-class Indian family  becomes extremely wealthy overnight? That is the question Diksha Basu answers in her debut novel, The Windfall. She doesn’t specifically ask this question but she has created a situation that is plausible as it is hilarious. 

Mr. Jha and his wife live in a small complex called Mayur Pallin in East Delhi. The atmosphere of the place reminds one of the bar on the American sitcom Cheers, where everyone knows your name”. It is not a slum but a community where everyone knows everyone else’s business. The complex is filled with neighbors who like to gossip, where people still hang laundry on ropes from their balconies, and where you can hear the clatter of dishes as the neighbors prepare for dinner. 

The Jhas have lived in the complex for almost twenty-five years. He is fifty-two and his wife forty-three; their twenty-three-year-old son Rupak is studying for his MBA at a university in the U.S. He has asked his closest neighbors and friends to gather in his living room so he can make an announcement before the gossiping starts. The Jhas are “moving out, and not just moving out, but moving to Gurgaon, one of the richest new neighborhoods in Delhi.”

Mr. Jha created a website which became quite successful and he has managed to sell it for twenty million dollars. He overhears one of his neighbors saying the sale of the website and his newly acquired wealth was “a lucky windfall.” However, Mr. Jha knows that it was no “lucky windfall,” He had worked hard on the website for four years before selling it.

The Jhas are moving into a two-story bungalow with front and back yards. The house is located in a quiet area of Gurgaon, “away from the traffic and chaos of the rest of Delhi.” It’s a place “that hawkers and beggars avoided.” The houses in Gurgaon are widely spaced apart and interaction with the neighbors is minimal. “Mr. Jha knows he was supposed to want that-- that was how rich people’s tastes were supposed to be.”

Now that Mr. Jha is rich, he wants to fit in with his new neighbors. He recently bought a new car, a Mercedes, which was embarrassingly delivered to his home in Mayur Palli. After he meets his new neighbor, Mr. Chopra, he feels the need to one-up Mr. Chopra on everything, much to the chagrin of his wife.

Meanwhile, his son in America is failing his classes. He is currently on academic probation and if his grades don’t improve, he will have to return to India, a failure in his parents’ eyes. He also has a white girlfriend named Elizabeth that he knows his parents will not approve of. Elizabeth keeps pressuring Rupak to talk to his parents about them but he uses every excuse he can think of to avoid this particular conversation. 

Rupak’s parents are planning to visit him and he is at his wit’s end as he has no idea how to tell his parents that his real interest is in film, not business. He is afraid to introduce Elizabeth to them, and he’s having a crisis of his own. 

The Windfall is a satire about wealth. It’s an Indian version of “keeping up with the Joneses.” The comical antics of Mr. Jha will have you shaking your head as he thinks of different ways to let his new neighbor know that he is as good as or better than they are. At times, Mr Jha’s actions will irritate and annoy you, but you can’t help smiling as you try to picture yourself in his shoes. 

What it all comes down to is that this is a story about family and belonging. It is also about ambition and failure. Who’s to say what we will do if we unexpectedly become rich beyond our means. I must say, I wouldn’t mind finding out. ~Ernie Hoyt

Daughters of the New Year by E. M. Tran (Hanover Square Press)

Xuan “wears her American citizenship with discomfort,”  she marinates the holiday dishes of her new country in soy sauce because fish sauce is impossible to find in New Orleans, and she reads a book of Chinese horoscopes every year “like a very important yearly report.” She has to. How else can she monitor the lives of her American daughters, the Earth Goat, the Fire Tiger, and the Earth Dragon? A Metal Tiger herself, Xuan knows the importance of these annual predictions and it’s her responsibility to keep her children informed. 

Trac, the Earth Goat, has graduated from Columbia Law with the knowledge that New York shares New Orlean’s racism without realizing it. Deciding she prefers the clarity of Southern bigotry, she now practices law in her hometown while struggling with the truth that as a Vietnamese American, she’s “not we, not them.” In love with a woman who’s a white Southerner, Trac knows the only ones who can understand her position are her sisters.

Nhi, the Fire Tiger, is in the city where her mother had captured the title of Miss Saigon 1973. As a contestant in an American get-the-bachelor reality show, this girl raised in New Orleans knows Saigon is “no more home to her than Bogota or Brussels, but here she feels her ancestry. She’s surrounded by people who look like her, whose language she’s heard all her life but can barely speak, and she feels as though in Saigon she’s “both a stranger and an intimate.”

Trieu is the youngest, still living at home, the Earth Dragon who knows her sisters’ secrets and guards them from their mother. Graduating from a “magnet” school where the elementary students are all gifted and mostly white, Trieu is alien in middle school where she’s surrounded by Black and first-generation Vietnamese American kids. She’s the Twinkie, yellow on the outside, white on the inside—and as the outsider, Trieu becomes an observer whose ambition is to write. 

Just as these women begin to take shape, they dissolve into a family history, one that mirrors the history of Vietnam. Suddenly Xuan is in a boat with her mother, her sister, and thirteen other people, with jewelry and gold sewn into her clothing, imperiled by starvation, thirst, and the threat of Thai pirates. Tien, Xuan’s mother, prepares her own mother for burial and sorts through photographs of a vanished life, before their family’s grand house and their rubber plantation was destroyed by a never-ending war. And back through the centuries the story goes, revealing secrets that were never told, the heroic exploits of women whom the New Orleans sisters will never know. 

A family tree traces the existence of these women, from the legendary Trung sisters who led an ancient rebellion to rid their country of Chinese rule to Xuan’s three daughters who each rebel in their own fashion. (All on the family tree are provided with their own zodiac sign, buttressing the novel’s title.)

Anyone who has grown up American in a family based upon immigrant ancestors, which is to say all of us, will understand E. M. Tran’s attempt to recover her shrouded family history. Her novel is essentially a collection of linked short stories, with no single character developing into fullness. The wit and scathing observations that bring the first portion of her narrative to life fade into a patchwork of history, with characters who are as faded as blotched and deteriorating photographs from the past. This is a book that should have gone deeper—and should have been much longer—to give its characters the life they deserve.~Janet Brown

On the Front Line : The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin by Marie Colvin (Harper)

I really respect and admire people who are totally dedicated to their work, especially those people who often make sacrifices of their own to help the more unfortunate. I believe that being a war correspondent is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. Journalists put their lives at risk to bring news of atrocities committed around the world. I am referring to the journalists who make an effort to go into the heart of a conflict, refusing to sit back in their comfortable hotels to report their stories secondhand from refugees, soldiers, and international aid workers. Marie Colvin was one of those people. 

Marie Colvin was an American who had been a war correspondent for the Sunday Times since 1986 when she covered the U.S. bombing of Tripoli in Libya. Since then, she reported on conflicts around the world. She covered the Iran-Iraq War, she stayed in Baghdad throughout the bombing during the first Persian Gulf War. She was also the first journalist to enter Kosovo from Albania with the Kosovo Liberation Army after the bombing by NATO planes.

She lost the sight of her left eye covering the conflict in Sri Lanka but that didn’t stop her from going back to other conflict zones after her recovery. She went back to the Middle East to report on the continuing problems facing Israeli-Arab relations, the departure of U.S. forces from Iraq and the resurgence of Al-Qaeda, on Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban fighting against Hamid Karzai’s government. She also sent dispatches from Iran, Egypt, and Libya, until she was killed in February of 2012 while covering the uprising in Syria. 

On the Front Line is a collection of her reports in the various conflicts she has covered. Several of the articles focus on the Middle East—the Iran-Iraq War, The Gulf War, Soviet Jews escaping persecution and finding refuge in Israel’s Occupied West Bank. She interviewed Yassir Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and was one of the three remaining journalists in Dili, in East Timor where the United Nations were planning to pull out leaving hundreds of East Timorese to fend for themselves against the Indonesian army and militias. However, thanks to her reporting, the U.N. reversed their decision to pull out. Colvin said, “I embarrassed the decision-makers and that felt good because it saved lives.”

Colvin’s long experience taught her that most governments lie or distort the truth to cover up what they are really doing and the only way for the world to know was for her to go in and report what she saw. The Sri Lankan government was a case in point. The northeast part of the island was controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.), a militant organization that fought to create an independent Tamil state because of the discrimination and violent persecution of them by the majority Sinhalese who dominated the Sri Lankan government. 

The ban against journalists going to the Tamil-held areas meant they could not speak with any of the leaders of the L.T.T.E. “even though the government was involved in negotiations with them through a Norwegian envoy to begin peace talks. The only news of the problems with those negotiations came from the government.”

The ban also meant that reporters had no first-hand accounts of the nearly half-million civilians living there, more than half of them being refugees. The people “were suffering under an economic embargo that the government denied existed.” Colvin was the first foreign journalist to enter the Tamil-controlled area of Sri Lanka. After she filed her story and tried to make her way back to the government-held area, she was shot in the eye, thus causing the eyepatch that became her famous trademark. 

I am fascinated and repulsed by crimes against humanity. After Colvin’s narrow escape from Sri Lanka, she was often asked if the risk was worth it. Some people called her brave while others said she must be stupid. Colvin responded to her critics and supporters alike, saying, “there’s no way to cover war properly without risk”. She didn’t care about what kinds of planes were flown, what types of tanks were used or the size of the artillery being rained down. What she wass most concerned about was “the experience of those most directly affected by the war, those asked to fight and those who are just trying to survive.” 

It amazes me as to how barbaric people can become. Colvin’s articles do not whitewash any of the facts —random killings, looting, rape, violence, torture, friendly neighbors turning on each other because they are of the wrong party or race. It appears it will take the world another millennia or more before all people realize that in war, it is the average citizen, young and old alike, who suffer the most. What the world truly needs are more people like Marie Colvin to continue writing the truth about the atrocities of war. ~Ernie Hoyt