Liberace's Filipino Cousin by David R. Brubaker (ThingsAsian Press)

One of my favorite genres to read is the travel essay. I love to travel and to share stories about where I've been and what I've experienced, so it should come as no surprise that I’m also an avid armchair traveler. The destination where I recently found myself traveling was through the eyes of David R. Brubaker in his collection of essays on his life and adventures in the Philippines.

Forget the Lonely Planet guide. Brubaker takes us even further off the beaten path to places we would never have considered, much less known about, without his amusing and entertaining anecdotes. His narrative ranges from stories of the "all-rounders," the Filipina maids and nannies who virtually raise the children of elite foreign nationals, to his quest to find out the members of a mysterious group called "The Lucky Buggers Club."  Brubaker discovers the club consists of the male "trailing spouses" of expat wives, a group who spends all its time playing golf, drinking beer, and not having to work.

In common with Brubaker's wife Marilyn, I did find one of his chapters quite disturbing, in which he writes about a Filipino local named Tony. No matter how you try to rationalize this man’s trade, the bottom line is his story is about a man who is proud of hooking up young Filipina women with older foreign gentlemen. Yes, the man is proud to traffic women and defends his practice by saying he is providing a service to help these women and their families flee the poverty of their nation. (Unfortunately, I don't believe this is a problem confined to the Philippines as it is a widespread issue throughout Southeast Asia.)

But there is no doubt after reading this book that you will  want to make plans to visit a country that’s so varied and colorful with its lush green vegetation, islands still ripe for development, friendly people who may be poor but are happy, sunshine, and beautiful beaches. However, Brubaker doesn’t shun the reality of the crime and poverty of Manila or other areas of the nation even as he makes clear that if you use your common sense there are hundreds of adventures to be had in the Philippines.

I thoroughly enjoyed my adventures in the Philippines as seen through the eyes of Brubaker and believe that anyone who reads Liberace's Filipino Cousin will enjoy it too.~ Ernie Hoyt

Available at ThingsAsian Books

 

Swimming in Hong Kong by Stephanie Han (Willow Spring Books)

In a skillful and ambitious short story collection, Stephanie Han proves that grouping people as “Asian” is an artificial and lazy way of blurring distinctive  cultures that have only a continent in common. Han, with roots in Hawaii that go back for more than a century, bypasses her heritage in Swimming in Hong Kong; the ten stories that comprise her book have settings that range from Seoul to Nantucket, told in the voices of Hong Kong scrap collectors, a Korean-American journalist waiting for her husband in the bar of an exclusive club that aspires to colonial grandeur, a KoreaTown manicurist who abandoned her young child when she left Seoul to work in the U.S., an aging Hong Kong swimmer who helps an African-American expatriate gain confidence in the water and in her life. She explores the sexual Orientalism of Western men and the feelings of the women who succumb to that particular fetish, skewers the ways of WASP preppies on the Eastern seaboard, and examines the difficulties of being a Korean-American girl with “the freedom of pocket money and an American life awaiting” at the end of time spent with her grandparents in Seoul.

Han illuminates these different worlds and voices with language that is vivid and crisp, descriptions that are precise and evocative. Her characters blaze with the heat of their common humanity, while clearly showing the cultural divides that yawn between each of them. If these people were ever brought together in one room, language would be the least of their differences. It’s a tribute to Stephanie Han’s talent that they convincingly populate the pages of her extraordinary debut. Their well-told stories, whether they take on the form of an insightful vignette as in “Hong Kong Rebound” or the shape and scope of a novella as in “The Body Politic, 1982”, make Swimming in Hong Kong a book to own and Han a writer to watch.~Janet Brown

「ギョッ」(Gyo) by 安藤正子 (Masako Endo) and illustrated by 岡本順 (Jun Okamoto) (Iwasaki Shoten)

Wanting to improve my Japanese reading skills, I went to the library to check out some books. My reading ability is still at a beginner level so I browsed the children's section and came across a book with an enticing cover that looked promising. The text is in Japanese with no English translation but has furigana (a Japanese reading aid which shows the simple way of reading kanji characters), which is helpful for children and people like me who still know far too few kanji characters.

The story is about a newspaper reporter named Mr. Mizuno who is thinking about what to write for his next article. He’s out fishing when he spots a young boy who helps him make a catch. As Mr. Mizuno takes the hook out of the fish and gets a good look, he sees the the fish's eyes look like binoculars. The boy drops his fishing net in surprise, and the fish escapes. Mr. Mizuno makes friends with the boy, Masashi, and then catches a normal-looking fish. The two of them grill the fish on the beach but Mr. Mizuno drops it on the sand when it’s fully cooked and their lunch becomes inedible. Instead they open cans of beer and juice, have a drink and prepare to leave.

Masashi takes his juice can to the nearest trash bin and can't believe how full the garbage can is and how dirty the beach is. He throws his can in another empty bin but Mr. Mizuno tosses his can away, hitting their abandoned grilled fish.

The next day Mr. Mizuno sits at a table in a coffee shop faced with a looming deadline and no story. He looks out the window and sees what looks like a man dressed as a giant fish is driving a jeep. He hurries out of the shop, flags down a car and convinces the driver to follow the jeep. They lose sight of the jeep but suddenly Mr. Mizuno finds himself out of the car, on the road, face to face with the giant fish!

“Is there something I can do for you?” asks the giant fish, “It seemed like you wanted something from me so I fished you out of the car with the antenna from this jeep.” Mr. Mizuno’s shirt is torn by a fish hook and he can’t believe his eyes. This isn’t a man wearing a giant fish costume, it’s a genuine talking fish who’s  as large as Mr. Mizuno himself.

When Mr. Mizuno asks the fish where he came from, the fish replies, “ I came from all the smaller fish that humans toss aside without a thought.” He adds that he’s hungry. and  Mr. Mizuno suggests that they have lunch but when the fish stops the jeep, there’s no restaurant to be found. The fish explains that this spot is his own personal restaurant. Mr. Mizuno looks around, sees a mountain of aluminum cans, and realizes this is where he was fishing when he met Masashi.

In the meantime, Masashi has found a small fish in a puddle and takes it home. It’s covered in mud so Masashi washes it and sees that it’s rainbow-colored. He wants to show  his mother and goes to look for her. But Masashi's fish starts eating everything it can get its mouth on and becomes as huge as the fish whom Mr. Mizuno has encountered. When Masashi comes home to find the giant fish, he tries to call for help, the fish eats the telephone before he can use it.

Mr. Mizuno’s giant fish had been nourished by many little fish that were discarded as waste. Those small fish had eaten all the accumulated garbage on the banks – the aluminum cans, the beer bottles and other assorted trash. And now what's to become of Masashi? Will the whole town be taken over by giant fish eating everything in sight? Somebody needs to do something, but what can be done?

This story is a warning to humans about what could happen if they let every little thing go to waste and don’t take better care of the planet.Entertaining from start to finish with a surprise ending, this book should be read by adults as well as children in order to make them think about how they treat their environment.~Ernie Hoyt