Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong (Random House)

Linda Hammerick has been given a privileged upbringing in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina. She’s a Hammerick, following in the path set by past generations of her prominent family. As a Hammerick, she’s destined to become a “legacy” at Yale where she’ll be on her way to a career as a lawyer, in emulation of the father she adores.

After reading To Kill a Mockingbird, Linda sees herself as Scout, although differences mar the similarity between Harper Lee’s heroine and the ambitious little girl in Boiling Springs. Linda has a condition that stands between her and the rest of the world. When she hears words, or speaks them herself, she tastes each one, something that breaks the concentration she needs to achieve academic success. To blunt the flavor of this strange sixth sense, she cuts its sharpness by anesthetizing her tastebuds with nicotine, hanging out with the school outcasts and puffing away at a cigarette before going to class.

In common with many Southern households as found in American literature, Linda’s home is laden with secrets and unspoken truths. Soon she learns to hide any experience of her own that might bring turmoil to her family. Even when she’s raped by a handyman when she’s eleven, she tells nobody except for her great-uncle, Baby Harper, a man who has undisclosed realities of his own.

“What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two,” Linda’s grandmother tells her just before the old woman dies,  taking any explanations with her. 

It’s only when Linda begins to practice law in Manhattan that she starts to reveal who she is and how her life was transformed when she was seven years old. Slowly memories that she had erased come back to her in “two sensations, one of my heart filling and one of it emptying.” The girl who has always seen herself as Scout begins to see herself as Boo Radley instead, a secretive hidden being disguised as the fortunate daughter of the Hammerick family.

Monique Truong has written a novel that’s stuffed with details of heartbreak and tragedy, love and survival. Linda Hammerick is an observer and what she sees and feel makes her life in Boiling Springs as evocative as Scout’s in Harper Lee’s classic or as Buddy’s in Truman Capote’s  A Christmas Memory.  Linda intertwines the story of her childhood with figures from Southern history: Virginia Dare, the Wright Brothers, George Moses Horton, a poet born into slavery--all of them people who were attached in some way to secrets. As she sees it, secrets are the legacy handed down to anyone who was born in the South.

This is a novel with very little dialogue. What Linda reports is as difficult to read as it is for her to hear, since every word is followed by the name of what carries its taste. “Don’t youcannnedgreenbeans wantsaltedbutter to stopcannedcorn by your mom’schocolatemilk placeroastturkey firstPeptobismol?”

Although this certainly conveys the difficulties faced by those with synesthesia, it makes the appearance of italics in a sentence something to dread and slows the progression of the narrative. It might have been easier if Truong had avoided dialogue altogether.

Still the characters and settings of Bitter in the Mouth are beautifully delineated by Truong’s gorgeous writing, putting her new narrator squarely beside the man in The Book of Salt  who also struggled with language and secrets or with Lafcadio Hearne in The Sweetest Fruits (Asia by the Book, May 2021) who lied and kept secrets in three different languages. Truong’s three novels interrelate in magical ways, making her readers wonder just what--and who-- she will bring to life next.~Janet Brown

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Simon & Schuster, release date May 2024)

You don’t like fantasy or science fiction? You shy away from thrillers populated with members of His Majesty’s Secret Service? You’d rather be flogged than read a romance novel? Me too--which is why I almost didn’t pick up Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time. And that would have been a shame. This novel, based heavily upon time travelers who have been shanghaied from different periods of history and are placed, against their will, in the 21st Century, blends all of the genres I despise and comes up with one of my favorite books of this year.

Graham Gore, an officer of the British Royal Navy who died during an ill-fated polar expedition in 1847, is only one of five “expats from history” who have been conveyed out of their own era into modern England. Each one of them is under intense scrutiny from the Ministry of Defense, who has chosen “handlers” who will live with them for their first year in another century. 

Gore’s handler is a young woman who has probably been selected for the job because her English father married a woman who had escaped Pol Pot’s Reign of Terror in Cambodia. A translator-consultant specializing in Southeast Asia and the Khmer language, she has lived with a displaced person all her life, a “mother who persistently carried her lost homeland jostling inside her like a basket of vegetables.”  

Gore, a thirty-seven-year-old military man who died as the Victorian era was just taking hold, is puzzled and frequently shocked by the young woman he will be confined with for a year. When she tells him that in their new residence, there’s “No maid. No cook either,” Gore turns pale. When his housemate utters “Damn,” within his hearing, he’s as horrified as he is when she tells him about the existence of germs. The two of them move through their living quarters like “clots in a lava lamp,” Very gradually, in ways that are both highly strained and very funny, they forge a friendship that begins to test the handler’s loyalty to the ministry that employs her.

Gore and the four other “expats” see themselves as “kidnap victims, mostly,” and as they learn about the time and place they’ve been forced to live in, they begin to question the motivation behind it. In rooms “designed to encourage bureaucracy,” they’re tested physically and mentally and come to realize they’re intended to serve a definite purpose, one that they and their handlers can’t fathom. Gore in particular resists this unknown result, “as if assimilation was a form of treachery to his past.” He, however, with his intelligence and charm, seems to be the most attractive candidate for the Ministry’s purposes, and his handler, against her better judgment, also finds she’s vulnerable to those same attractions.

When one of the handlers disappears and a mysterious Brigadier comes on the scene, both Gore and his handler unite in figuring out whatever plot is brewing, while at the same time they fall in love.

If this sounds hackneyed, guess again. Gore’s handler is the narrator of this convoluted story and she’s a woman with a sharp wit and a well-furnished mind. Her observations are wide-ranging and piercing, acerbic and laugh-out-loud funny. Her Cambodian-English bloodline has given her a name that few people can pronounce so she goes without it throughout the entire novel. Her family history also leads her to thoughts of inherited trauma and “how socially awkward it is live with.” “My face does a good impression of whiteness,” she says, grateful that her appearance isn’t “dragging a genocide around, which is good because that sort of thing makes people uncomfortable.” When her sister writes about her mixed-race background, the narrator wonders if the memoir is an act of “reclamation” or a way of leaving “all our wounds open to the dirty world.”

Her voice is interspersed with Gore’s memories of being trapped in the Arctic, on a ship immobilized by ice that “tilts queasily to one side,” and “bellows in agony.” Gore and his comrades are tortured by “the persistent grieving and shrieking of the wood…that robs them of sleep and silence.” “The northern seas are full of teeth,” and lead to terrible deaths.

 When Gore and the narrator fall in love, they hold each other “the way that poems hold clauses.” “He lives in me like trauma does,” the narrator says when the two of them are separated. Believe me, this is not the sort of romance found in the usual bodice-ripper.

British Cambodian author Kaliane Bradley has filled The Ministry of Time with writing that has devilish twists and carries a haunting depth, along with sentences that made me gasp one minute, laugh the next. Who else but this writer could resurrect a dim historical figure from the 19th century, use facts from his life along with a single image of his face on a daguerreotype, and make him a figure unique in modern-day fiction? Bradley’s sharp, savage, and satirical voice is mingled with tenderness and brilliant flares of imagination. It’s addictive and I want more.~Janet Brown

Read Me a Story! : Magic Mango and Many Other Stories from Asia and the Pacific by Various authors (Asian Cultural Centre for UNESCO)

Read Me A Story! is a collection of short stories that should be read aloud to young children. The book was compiled by the Asian Cultural Centre for UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). Twenty countries contributed the stories and illustrations to this book which was first published in 1991. 

The contributing countries include Papua New Guinea, India, Japan, Iran, Nepal, Mongolia, Australia, Vietnam, Republic of Korea, Laos, Myanmar, New Zealand, China, Philippines, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Bangladesh. Some countries have contributed more than one story.

Magic Mango is the lead story which originated in Papua New Guinea. It’s about a mango that could think and talk. It lived at the top of a mango tree and could see many things. It could see the village by the river, it could see the mountains a long way away, and it could even see the sea. It was the mango’s wish to see all of these places but the mango couldn’t leave the tree. However, one day a very strong wind blew it off the tree. It found itself on the ground and decided to run off and see the world. During its travels, it was chased by a pig, a little boy, two women, and a hungry hunter. They all wanted to eat the mango but the mango ran and sang “I’m a magic mango, You can’t cat me. I’m off to look at the world, you see.” You will have to read the story yourself to see if the mango was eaten or not.

One of the stories contributed by the country of India is Matsya, the Beautiful Fish. This story is an Indian version of Noah’s Ark. Matsya was a small and beautiful fish that lived in the ocean. However, a bigger fish thought that Matsya might be delicious to eat. Matsya managed to run away. Another day, a fish with sharp, pointy teeth also wanted to eat Matsya but he managed to escape again. Matsya swam and swam until he came to the edge of the ocean where he met a kind fisherman named Manu. Manu and his wife watched over Matsya until he became a large fish. It was Matsya who warned the fisherman and his wife of a disaster that was going to happen. He said there would be a big flood and that Manu and his wife should build a boathouse where they will be safe. If you’re a Christian, doesn’t that sound familiar?

The story contributed by the Philippines is titled The City Mouse and The Barrio Mouse. It’s a Filipino version of the original Aesop’s Fable The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. Americans will know the story as The Country Mouse and the City Mouse. A thirteenth century priest, Odo of Cheriton, phrased the moral of the story as, “I’d rather gnaw a bean than be gnawed by continual fear.”

The stories contributed by my adopted country of Japan include The Magic Drum and Topsy-Turvy Rabbit known in Japan as Fushigi na Taiko and Kenta Usagi. In the first story, a man named Gengoro had a magic drum. If he beat one side of the drum and chanted “Long be the nose, long be the nose!” the nose would grow. If he beat the other side of the drum and chanted, “Short be the nose, short be the nose!”, the nose would shorten. He used this magic to make people happy. However, one day he wanted to know how long a nose could grow. He beat his drum, saying, “Long be my nose, long be my nose!” until his nose reached the clouds. However, at the time in Heaven, carpenters were making a bridge over the Amanogawa (the Milky Way). His nose appeared right where a carpenter was fixing a railing on the bridge. Gengoro thought there was something wrong with his nose, so he beat the other side of the drum but instead of his nose shrinking, his body was going up into the heavens! What will happen to Gengoro?

Topsy-Turvy Rabbit was a little boy rabbit named Kenta who decided to play a game by doing and saying everything opposite of what he really means. I’m sure most children have played this game at home, annoying their parents and siblings. I know I have. Kenta’s father said that it looks like fun and said he’ll become a topsy-turvy rabbit too. He says, “Right, I’ll have Kenta Rabbit go to the office in my place. Father Rabbit will stay home and play all day.” So, with Father Rabbit’s reverse psychology, Kenta no longer decided to be a topsy-turvy rabbit. 

Every story will be sure to delight children and adults alike. Even if you have no children, all the stories should be read aloud. You may regain your sense of innocence from your childhood. ~Ernie Hoyt

Brick Lane by Monica Ali (Scribner)

Mymensingh District, East Pakistan, 1967. “Rupban screamed white heat, red blood”. Her husband rushed to her side to kill the man who was killing his wife. He knew it was her but when he got there, his sister-in-law, Mumtaz told him to fetch Banesa, a midwife who claimed to be one hundred and twenty years old. Since nobody can remember when she was born and as she was “more desiccated than an old coconut, no one cared to dispute it”.

So begins Monica Ali’s story of family, love, and tradition. Brick Lane is this and more. It is also about fitting into a new society and culture as an immigrant family. The main theme is the conflict between believing in Fate or being able to choose one’s own destiny.

Nazneen was stillborn, as she had been told all her life. Her mother thought she had a bad case of indigestion. Banesa said she would be happy to prepare for the burial, at an extra cost, but just then the baby let out a yowl. The old woman said it was a death rattle and Rupban could take two routes. Take the baby to the city, a hospital, where they “will put wires on her and give medicines” or “you can just see what Fate will do”. 

Mumtaz said of course they would take the baby to the city but Rupban refused, saying “No, we must not stand in the way of Fate. Whatever happens, I accept it. And my child must not waste any energy fighting against Fate. That way, she will be stronger.” Mumtaz had no choice but to accept what her sister said. As Nazneen grew up, she would often hear the story of “How You Were Left to Your Fate”. 

Nazneen’s sister, Hasina, was born three days after the death of the midwife. She grew up to be a beautiful girl. When she was sixteen she eloped with the nephew of a sawmill owner and left the family home. For two weeks, their father would sit and wait “cursing his whore-pig daughter whose head would be severed the moment she crawled back”. Needless to say, she never did come back.

Then one day, Nazneen’s father asked her if she would like to see the man she would marry the following month. She refused but out of the corner of her eyes, she saw the photo showing a man who was about forty years old and “had a face like a frog”. They would marry and he would take her back to England to live.

Tower Hamlets, London, 1985. Nazneen has been living in London for only six months. She still can’t speak the language except for a few words. She and her husband live in a neighborhood where a number of other Bengali people live. Her husband has invited his friend, Dr. Azad, to his home for a nice dinner. Nazneen is nervous although “it was only dinner. One dinner. One guest.”

As Nazneen tries to settle into life in a new country, a new culture, she is at times overwhelmed. She would often recite passages from the Qu’ran to settle her nerves. She also receives letters from her sister Hasina who lives a parallel life with Nazneen, trying to find balance and happiness in her own environment

The couple eventually have a son whom Nazneen names Tariq although her husband always calls him Ruku. Unfortunately, Tariq would not live into his adolescent years. The cause of his death remained unknown. 

Tower Hamlets, London, 2001. Nazneen and her husband Chanu are now the parents of two young girls. The older one, named Shahana, is the more rebellious of the two. As she grows up in the U.K., she cannot stand it when her father teaches them or talks to them about the greatness of Bangladesh. She always retorts with, “I didn’t ask to be born here”.

Her younger sister, Bibi, is more acquiescent to her father’s demands and always tries to please him. Nazneen also questions her own values about being a good Muslim woman, “a nice village girl. Unspoilt”. She is having thoughts of a younger man while her husband is determined that the entire family will move back to Bangladesh. 

Monica Ali really brings to light about what it means to be Muslim in a mostly Christian country. However, I did find her male characters to be rather two-dimensional. As I am not a follower of Islam, I cannot say with confidence how true to life her depictions of the men in this story are. They all seem to be full of pride and believe that their word is law in the family. 

Ali also brings to light the plight of Muslim women. Many of their husbands forbid them to work even when the husband’s salary is often not enough to feed the family. Yet, according to the men, if their wife is working, they will be looked down upon as a man who cannot provide for his family and their family would be shamed. 

In today’s world, it’s not enough to be “the man of the house”. Tradition is fine and all but we must consider the time and circumstances to find true happiness. At least that it what I believe. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Liberators by E. J. Koh (Tin House)

“The fog drew rosefinches, like blooms in the low bush, whose cries I mistook for rainfall.” 

Yohan is a man obsessed with words, who can write them in six languages. During his lifetime, he has lived through the Japanese occupation of Korea, survived the horrors of World War Two, and “watched the country divided up as spoils of war.” What puts him into prison is a shadowed mystery with a partial disclosure: “To be a spy was to one day be known.”

Decades later, living in America, his daughter meets a man who draws a tiger on her bare back and tells her “It’s Korea…if the country had no stitches” and was reunified as a single nation. Although he knows “The South doesn’t want to rebuild the North. And the North doesn’t trust the South,” he is devoted to bringing the two divisions back together once more. His dream is rejected by the Korean men who come to his meetings in a local pool hall and when he returns to Korea, he’s imprisoned “for crimes of moral turpitude.”

Although politics is a hopeless quagmire that gobbles up idealism, Yohan’s daughter erases divisions in her own family by nurturing  her North Korean daughter-in-law. When she dresses the mother of her grandchild in the green hanbok that was once worn by her own mother, “the fabric folded smoothly..,the ribbon falling down the front, a new verdant path.”

Like Yohan, E.J. Koh is dominated by words. In her memoir, The Magical Language of Others (Asia by the Book, November 2020), she describes her life, lived in four languages, English, Korean, Japanese, and poetry. “Languages,” she says, “as they open you, can also allow you to close.” 

In her first novel, Koh lets the language of poetry open windows and then she slams them shut. Six characters are partially revealed in The Liberators but none of them are as fully realized as the images that surround them. In a gorgeous section entitled Animal Kingdom, Yohan’s grandson is given a dog, “a bright and curious joy,”  that’s “joined to the boy like a wish.” Later the boy is united with the woman he will marry in “the elaborate braid of our bodies.” Trapped in poetry, he and the other five characters that fill these pages remain “shadows that flew up and shattered across the ceiling.” Each of them is truncated by subtlety, as if they were created to convey Koh’s language rather than the reversal that would have given them life. They are pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, given just enough definition to merge into a whole pattern.

Mixed with Koh’s poetic language is the harshness of political reality in which a country with millennia of history and tradition becomes sacrificed to global economic interests. When Koreans gather together in America to watch the TV coverage of the Olympic ceremony in Seoul, the doves that symbolize world peace perch on the flaming cauldron and are burned alive, “a memory that had to be erased…that had to be forgotten in our soft, closed palms.” 

“Why visit the past, why go digging up its grave?” asks the man who dreams of Korea as a tiger, complete and undivided. Yohan’s daughter answers him by embracing the present in another country, unified with her North Korean daughter-in-law, a conclusion that escapes cliche because Koh has clothed it in poetry.~Janet Brown

Once the Shore by Paul Yoon (Sarabande Books)

Floating across the landscape of Solla, one of the many islands lying off the coast of Korea in the East China Sea, are eight enigmatic stories. The characters within them are as mysterious and evanescent as rain-drenched spiderwebs, each embodying a different part of the island’s history and each one of them abandoned in mid-moment. The ends of their stories are left for the reader to imagine, based upon the hints that were strewn through each of their narratives. 

An aging American widow comes to a resort on Solla, searching for traces of the man her husband once might have been. An elderly couple in 1947 take their ancient trawler to the site of U.S bomb tests that destroyed twenty Korean fishing boats, one of which held their only son. A woman who owns a shop in a Solla tourist town has her past return to confront and betray her. A sixty-year-old “sea woman” dives into the depths of the ocean as she has every day since she was thirteen, her only friend a boy who lost his arm to a shark and who longs for her to bring him a sea turtle. An American deserter upsets the peace of a Solla mountain village by overstaying his welcome and befriending a young crippled village girl. A farmer sells his land to a developer with “fingers clean as polished silver” and plans to turn it into a hotel that will overlook a golf course, while his young daughter, haunted by a ghost who wears the dress of her dead mother, furiously opposes his decision. An orphan girl who has been employed by an “American hospital” watches cargo trucks deliver men on stretchers, soldiers who have come from Australia, France, Greece, to fill a thousand beds in a place that had once been a vocational school run by the Japanese. A young married couple live in a highrise building among the tourist businesses of Solla City, making their living through tourism in a world of hotels and markets that sell souvenirs.

Through the kaleidoscope of these stories, the history of Solla island is made tangible and the island itself takes on a substance that eludes the lives of the people who pass over it like clouds. Solla, with its caves and forested hills and Tamra Mountain rising above it all, is described so meticulously that it comes as a shock when Yoon admits it has never existed at all. Its alluring beauty can be visited only in these pages.

The eerie shadow-lives of the characters in Once the Shore exist as faded silhouettes against an island whose history is being devoured by war and international businesses. The young couple in the final story exist in a different universe from the old woman who dove for fish. They visit parts of their island as tourists, divorced from what exists beneath the commercial facade. When they go to Tamra Mountain, they hire a guide. Solla no longer belongs to them, unlike the sea woman who once took possession of the ocean every day. Within its depths “the world consisted of light towers, sunlit, and she swam among them,” every day for more than half a century, knowing she is one of the last to have “carried seawater within them.”

The young couple whose lives are consumed by tourism are unaware of how Solla’s “winds, like great birds, came in from the sea” or the majesty of its “trees, slow moving and wide as ships.”  They are unable to see the beauty of its twilight, with the sea’s “silver reflections folding over one another like the linking of fingers.” When they buy a platter of abalone from a sea woman in a tourist market, they have no idea they’re in the company of the island’s fading history.

Through Yoon’s stories, the glory of an imaginary place becomes real and its gradual loss becomes a sharp and bitter grief.~Janet Brown

Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong (Sceptre)

Qui Xiaolong was born in Shanghai, China and went to the United States in 1988 to write a book about T.S. Eliot. Then in 1989, The Tiananmen Square Massacre happened, so he decided to remain in the U.S. to avoid persecution back home. 

Death of a Red Heroine is the first book in his series of crime novels featuring Police Inspector Chen Cao who works for the Shanghai Police Department. Cao was a rising star in The Communist Party of the Republic of China and was on the road to become a diplomat. Unfortunately, one of his uncles was found to be a counter-revolutionary so he was assigned to his current position.

In Communist China, even if a distant relative is found to be a counter-revolutionary or if some relative had committed a crime, no matter how minor, it can affect one’s standing in getting a promotion or not. Chen was lucky. Although he was considered “an educated youth” who graduated from high school, he was not sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution “to be reeducated by poor and lower-middle peasants”.

Fortune seemed to smile down upon Chen as he is assigned his own apartment, which is another social problem of living in Shanghai. During Chen’s housewarming party, he receives a call from his colleague, Detective Yu Guangming. The body of a young, naked woman was found in a remote area of a canal.

Chen is head of the “special case” department and does not usually deal with homicide cases. However, Detective Yu says there’s nobody else to handle the case that particular day so he goes out to investigate it. Normally, their squad didn’t have to take a case until it was declared “special” by the bureau, usually for an unstated political reason. 

It has been four days and still no one has filed a missing persons report. Chen is still contemplating whether to take the case or not but first decides to ask his friend who is also the medical examiner who did the autopsy to give him a detailed description of the victim. Once he gets the information, he faxes it along with a picture of the deceased to various units and surprisingly receives a response in the following week. 

The picture is recognized by a security guard at the Shanghai First Department store. The woman had said she was going on vacation but had not returned. Chen shows the picture to the people who worked with her and they all recognize her. Her name was Guan Hongying. “Guan for closing the door. Hong for the color red, and Ying for heroine”. “Red Heroine”. Chen remembers her name. She had been a National Model Work and a Party member. 

However, this is the only information that Chen and Yu has but Chen decides that their branch would take the case. He informs his superior that he will treat it as any homicide case and because the victim was a well-known celebrity, he will keep her name out of the news and press. 

As their investigation progresses, it leads them to their number one suspect —Wu Xiaoming, the son of a powerful Communist Party official. People like Wu Xiaming are informally called H.C.C., High Cadre’s Children. They often behave as if they are above the law, believing no one can touch them because their parents are in a position that puts fear into the lives of normal people. 

Once Chen Cao’s superior becomes aware of who their primary suspect is, a lot of pressure is put on him to deter him from continuing the investigation. Chen knows that it is best to toe the Party Line but he cannot in good conscience give up the investigation although he knows that he could be relieved of his duty or worse yet, be taken off the force. Will Chen Cao follow orders or will he continue the investigation knowing the results might put an end to his career?

It’s not hard to imagine the Republic of China putting the government and the Communist Party first and foremost above everything else. I also imagine the H.C.C. are quite similar in attitudes to children of diplomats, especially embassy kids, whom I have had the misfortune of having to deal with when I worked retail. But if there are more people like Detective Chen Cao in China, then I do see hope for China’s future. ~Ernie Hoyt