Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian (Penguin Press, April 2021)

Although the publishing world seems to believe that light reading takes place only in summer, along with a tropical cocktail sipped under a beach umbrella, that’s not really when readers need something clever and diverting. We hunger for froth and frivolity when the days are short and dark, when everyone seems on their way to a holiday party to which we are not invited, Never has the need for smart fluff been more acute than during this December when none of us are invited to a holiday party and all of us are close to climbing the walls that we’ve been encouraged to remain within.

Still we want something that’s as smart as it is amusing, maybe holding a subtle sting while leaving no permanent scars, not quite as vicious as Evelyn Waugh but with more bite than Candice Bushnell. Bonus points are given for any book that delivers this as a delightful surprise, with a stiletto, not a sledge hammer.

Welcome to Gold Diggers, whose title gives subterranean clues to its subtlety. What begins as a high school romantic farce involving middle-class Indian American teenagers in a quiet suburb suddenly is alchemized into a fantasy in which a mother pilfers gold that’s brewed into a liquid that will give her daughter success. When the boy next door becomes involved, things get out of hand. Success is accompanied by tragedy, as King Midas once discovered, and the teenagers who have benefited from the magical potion drift apart.

But this is only a hook designed to pull readers into a world of satire that unexpectedly emerges from what at first promises to be Teen Angst, Bollywood Style.  Suddenly Miss Teenage India and the high school debate champion are adults in the world of Bay Area high tech wizards; their friends work “for a Sherman Act-violating behemoth...always nursing side start-ups,” “helping robotic men build robots,” their incomes “supplemented with Bitcoin investments.” One of them is “a rarity in San Francisco, in that he had read a book  not ghostwritten on behalf of an investor or a CEO.” They search for prospective mates on an Indian marriage app and buy houses in the “sunny small towns of the Bay Area, “the upper-middle-class Indian American promised land,” homes “full of smart thermostats and smart fridges.” 

Sanjena Sathian cleverly dissects the difference between immigrants who are “fresh off a private jet,” rather than “off the boat,” the phenomenon of massive bridal expos held in regional convention centers, high school parties with a buffet table laden with chaat, pitchers of mango lassi and mini cheese pizzas in an  “emptied three-car garage” the overwhelming need for “posh private school” graduates “to waltz into Harvard and Princeton and Vanderbilt and Georgetown.” But underpinning the satire and keeping it from turning into cruelty is a world of myth and history, a comic caper that threatens to end badly, and a love story that seems fated for disaster. Although Sathian seems to take a scalpel to the lives of a “model minority,” she actually directs it squarely into the heart of the exclusionary yet alluring American Dream, the one based on a Gold Rush and is still racing in that frenzied direction.~Janet Brown

Barefoot in the Boardroom by Bill Purves (Allen & Unwin)

In the early eighties, the People’s Republic of China created the Open Door Policy which was announced by Deng Xiaoping. It allowed foreign companies to set up businesses in the mainland. Special Economic Zones were created in the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian in the hopes of attracting direct foreign investments. Deng Xiaping believed the policy would help modernize China and boost its economy.

Bill Purves was born in Canada but currently lives in Hong Kong. In 1988, after spending five years in the British Protectorate and learning the language, Purves was looking for a new job and his eyes stopped at a small ad for a job opening in the classifieds. He sent in an application although he was not very enthusiastic about his chances of actually landing the job. “It seemed unlikely that I would stumble on a genuinely senior position in the classifieds, but in Hong Kong postage is cheap.”.  

Barefoot in the Boardroom is Purve’s first-hand account of living and working in the People’s Republic of China. He was hired as the General Manager by Gold Land Limited, a cast iron foundry located in a rural town in mainland China. Gold Land Limited is a joint-venture company between the government-owned danwei or ‘work unit’ and a company based in Hong Kong which was still a British colony at the time.

Purves shares his observations and gives us his impressions of the working conditions at the foundry for the two years he worked there. We share his trials and tribulations as he tries to apply Western management principles on a country that was still unfamiliar with sales and marketing. Product isn’t manufactured on a supply and demand basis as the factory’s quota is set by a government committee.

One of the ideals of communist China was to create an ‘iron rice bowl’ for its workers, “using each according to his abilities and providing for each according to his needs.” As Americans, we would call this “job security” or “job for life”. The result, according to Purves, has created a “vast and ineffective state planning apparatus and a tangle of social welfare policies and regulations.”

Another one of the biggest problems Purves noticed was the lack of any modern office equipment. There were no phones, no faxes, no copy machines. Without any phone lines or an intercom system, the managers of various departments would arrive at the General Manager’s office unannounced because there was no way to make an appointment. All copies of any documents had to be done using carbon paper. The factory used onion-skin paper so if an error was made which was prone to damage if an erasure was made. 

This crash course in how business works in the People’s Republic of China is surprising as it is eye-opening. The market and economy has improved vastly since the eighties but it is the pioneering efforts of joint-ventures like Gold Land Limited and others that set the country on the path to prosperity while still keeping in touch with it’s communist doctrines. Currently, most factories and their suppliers must follow the Global Supply Chain Compliance and if they don’t, I would have second thoughts about buying anything with “Made in China” printed on it. ~Ernie Hoyt

Wuhan Diary by Fang Fang, translated by Michael Berry (HarperCollins)

It began in Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Market. Of the 41 patients in that city who first were treated for the virus that would bring the world to its knees, two-thirds of them had visited that market in December. By January 1, 2020 the market was closed and rumors that SARS had returned were sweeping Wuhan where city officials advised residents to wear masks and stay home. This was followed by the announcement that this new illness was  “not contagious between people. It’s controllable and preventable.” But by January 20th, officials admitted there were cases of  human-to-human transmission. Two days later the city was masked and streets had little traffic. On January 23rd,  Wuhan was under quarantine and the city of 11 million people would remain that way for 76 days.

In 2020 the Lunar New Year festivities began on January 25th  but in the weeks before that, “approximately five million people” had left Wuhan to travel during the long public holiday. The first cases outside of China appeared in the popular vacation mecca of Thailand on January 3rd, quickly spreading to Europe and eventually moving on to the US. In Wuhan, three days before the quarantine was announced, over 40,000 families had clustered together indoors for a public banquet and on the following day the city government had put on a “song and dance” concert. The virus couldn’t have appeared at a worse time.

Fang Fang, a prolific author in her sixties, began to keep a public journal of life under lockdown that she published on China’s social media platforms, always finding an outlet for her news reports even when the major media sites blocked her from posting. From January into March of 2020, she chronicled life in her city, candidly and in detail.

Wuhan, she reports, banned motor vehicles in the downtown area and shut down all public transportation. People who became ill walked from one overcrowded hospital to the next, desperately seeking treatment. Within days, Wuhan had built temporary hospitals which were quickly filled to capacity. Face masks were soon in short supply and people began to reuse disposable ones, washing them and disinfecting them with a hot iron. But, Fang Fang says, there was little need for mask wearing since people left home only to buy food and soon even those outings stopped. Neighborhood volunteers brought food to the quarantined. Families were cooped up together and there were no people on the streets. The city was “quiet and beautiful, it’s not a purgatory,” Fang Fang says, “until someone falls ill.”

“We need to get through fourteen days of isolation,” she says at the outset, and then “I need to bear another week.” This refrain quickly changes to her realization that “hunkering down at home and following this through to the very end” is the only way to survive. “There are too many sick people and not enough beds...The people don’t have enough tears to mourn all these deaths.” 

As translator Michael Berry says. Fang Fang’s reports were “dispatches from the future,” that were ignored by the West. Her posts were on “public platforms from the beginning, a virtual open book.” Berry began his translation on February 25th and by March, he says, “my life gradually began to mimic Fang Fang’s,” with one major difference. By April 8th 2020, coronavirus cases had fallen close to zero in Wuhan. In the US, deaths were raging in New York City. By December 13th of this year, US deaths had reached nearly 300,000. In Wuhan on December 11th, the Guardian reported, there had been no recorded cases of community transmission since May.

The tragedy is that every mistake, every cover-up, every shortage that had occurred in Wuhan was later replicated in the US. If Fang Fang had only been listened to, if Wuhan’s measures had been instituted worldwide, how different would life be now?~Janet Brown

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino (Abacus)

The London Times calls Keigo Higashino “The Japanese Stieg Larsson”. He is one of the most popular mystery writers in Japan. Over two million copies of his books have been sold and many of them have been adapted into successful films. 

The Devotion of Suspect X is the first English publication in a series to feature physicist and part-time sleuth Manabu Yukawa, translated from the Japanese by Alexander O. Smith. Yukawa has helped solve many cases for the police and has garnered the nickname of Professor Galileo, named after the famous scientist who supported Copernicus’s theory that the sun was the center of the universe and the Earth revolved around it.

Yasuko Hanaoka is a single mother with a daughter in high school. She divorced her abusive husband five years prior and currently works at a bento shop in town. Yasuko’s world is shaken up by the unexpected appearance of her ex-husband and she ends up killing him in self-defense.

Ishigami is a mathematical genius who currently works at a local high school. He has heard he scuffle and when he rings the doorbell after things quiet down to ask if he can help, he spots a body half-hidden underneath the kotatsu. He convinces Yasuko to let him help and says he will take care of everything, including disposing of the body. 

Detective Kusanagi is called to investigate a crime scene along the Edogawa River along the Tokyo side, across from Chiba Prefecture. The body had been left on an embankment wrapped in a blue plastic tarp. The body was stripped of all clothes, the face was smashed and the fingers were burned so the police could not identify the body by dental records or fingerprints. The police also found an abandoned bicycle nearby It was fairly new and both of its tires were flat. The police found prints on the bicycle. They belonged to a man named Shinji Togashi...Yasuko Hanaoka’s ex-husband.

Yasuko becomes the number one suspect for the police but she has a rock solid alibi completely arranged by Ishigami. Ishigami’s elaborate scheme even fools the police. Detective Kusanagi cannot find any holes in Yasuko’s alibi and yet still feels something isn’t right about the case. He decides to ask advice from his physicist friend, Manabu Yukawa. 

It turns out that Detective Kusanagi, Yukawa and Yasuko’s neighbor, Ishigami, all attended the same university around the same time. For reasons unknown to Detective Kusanagi, Yukawa focuses on his old friend and colleague Ishigami. Yunokawa is as brilliant as Ishigami and he’s interested in finding a flaw in Ishigami’s elaborate plan and helps the police in the process. 

Keigo Higashino doesn’t make you think of who committed the crime but how the crime was committed. The ending may surprise and shock you. The story is more than just a simple whodunit, it is a story of human nature and what lengths a man is willing to take to protect what he cherishes the most even if that love is not reciprocated. Could you make that same sacrifice? ~Ernie Hoyt

Self Portraits : Tales form the Life of Japan's Great Decadent Romantic by Osamu Dazai (Kodansha)

Osamu Dazai is the pen name of Shuji Tsushima, one of the most popular 20th century writers in Japan, although he is not as well known outside of his native land. He has quite a cult following and is still admired today. He was born in the small town of Kanagi in Aomori Prefecture, the northernmost Prefecture on Honshu Island, the largest of Japan’s four main islands. 

Osamu Dazai is the eighth surviving son of Gen’emon Tsushima and his wife Tane. His family was one of the wealthiest landowners in his hometown. He was highly influenced by Ryunosuke Akutagawa and was taken under the wings of Masuji Ibuse, author of “Black Rain”. 

Self Portraits is a collection of short stories based on various episodes in his life and is presented in chronological order. Ralph F. McCarthy who translated the stories from the Japanese also gives a bit of background information on the time and places of each incident. McCarthy says a more suitable term for these stories would be to call them “autobiographical fiction”.

In My Elder Brothers, Dazai relates how his father died when he was fourteen and how Bunji, the eldest of his three older brothers became the head of the household. Dazai says, “My elder brothers were all so kind to me and so grown up and sophisticated I scarcely felt the loss of my father.” “The eldest was like a father to me, and the second eldest like a long-suffering uncle, and I let myself be totally pampered by them.”

The basis for Female is about the first of Dazai’s suicide attempts. In the story, Dazai is talking to a friend about writing a story for a magazine. It is a story within a story. As the two near the climax of the story, the friend asks, “What happened?” “‘Let’s die’, I said. She, too…”. The friend interrupts, “Stop right there. You’re not just making this up.” At the end of the story, Dazai admits to his readers, “He was right. The following afternoon the woman and I attempted suicide.”. Unfortunately, the woman dies but Dazai survives.

Thinking of Zenzo has Dazai going to a gathering of Aomori natives in Tokyo, sponsored by the Tokyo branch of an Aomori newspaper. At the event, he plans to give a speech but takes a seat at the back and proceeds to drink continuously, gets very drunk and makes a fool of himself.

Canis familiaris was written while writing and living in Kofu, Yamanashi Prefecture, he is accosted by a stray dog who follows him home. Dazai has a fear of dogs but for some reason, takes the dog in. It becomes part of the family and becomes a farce as he tries to get rid of it.

Dazai may have been disturbed and he certainly did have a bad case of low self-esteem, but these stories based on his life will certainly bring a smile to your face. Tragic as his life may or may not have been (depending on how much of his stories you believe to be true), his legacy lives on. As more of his works become available in English, it is my hope that more people will come to know his genius. ~Ernie Hoyt

Run Me to Earth by Paul Yoon (Simon & Schuster)

Imagine putting together a jigsaw puzzle that when finished will become a Chinese painting done in ink, in which the empty spaces are as meaningful as the brush strokes. Imagine being caught by its slow beauty and subtlety, then feeling the awe that comes when all the pieces are at last in place. This is what happens while reading Paul Yoon’s Run Me to Earth, a novel that’s breathtaking in what—and how much—it reveals.

Three children serve as couriers for a makeshift hospital in an abandoned French villa, a refuge for people who are unlikely to survive. “The three orphans,” as they’re known to all now, ride motorcycles through fields made deadly by unexploded ordnance, bombies buried in the earth. Two boys and a girl, bound together by their early lives in a Laos village, where the houses were so close together that the sounds from one family’s daily living also belonged to their neighbor, live in the moment. They ride through the possibility of death every day to bring medicine and supplies back to the doctors who tend to the nearly-dead. Through war the three have become nomad children who know how to kill with a needle of air plunged into a vein, with the quick slash of a scalpel, or with the pistols they always carry with them. They’re certain they will never die; they “have learned from the dead” where to find the safe paths they’ll  take for their motorcycle journeys.

An old woman whom everyone calls Auntie directs the network of couriers that span the bombed country, a childhood friend of the doctor who’s head of the hospital where the children live and work. She’s the one who engineers escapes into Thailand. She’s the one who will eventually clean and bury the severed head of one of the three orphans. She’s the one who sends a young orphan across the Mekong river, into a Thai refugee camp, a girl laden with “the intensity of a promise”—to find the child who made it to a world of safety.

That young girl, who becomes part of a Lao family that makes a life in upstate New York, learns in a small town ballpark not to recoil from the sight of the hurled baseballs that are the same size and shape as a bombie. As an adult, she travels in search of the survivor, bringing with her a tangible trace of the lives those three courier-children once shared, back when they were centaurs, half-human, half-motorbike, believing they were immortal.

Paul Yoon has created a masterpiece of loss and yearning, the story of the one who left, the one who went back, the one who went off the path, and the one who became burdened with the promise she made to someone she’s met only once. Every small detail of this spare novel is resonant with meaning; every description brands its poetry into memories so tangible they become the readers’ own: “Rain spraying on the windows,” a “moon the color of fire,” “the paling dark.” Run Me to Earth becomes the circle drawn in pencil on a scrap of paper that’s carried to the survivor, haunting, permanent, and never-ending, one that should be started again immediately after it’s finished~Janet Brown

Hong Kong Local: Cult Recipes from the Streets that Make the City by ArChan Chan (Smith Street Books, Simon & Schuster, Australia)

The eye-popping colors and explosive graphic design on the cover of Hong Kong Local: Cult Recipes from the Streets that Make the City immediately announce this is a cookbook that breaks the sound barrier.. ArChan Chan has taken this category into a new arena that she’s steeped in unrestrained exuberance.

Born and bred in Hong Kong, Chan knows her territory and cleverly takes it from the realm of “food paradise” to a 24-hour all-you-can-eat buffet. Dividing her book into Early, Mid, and Late, Chan guides her readers through the culinary delights of a day in Hong Kong, showing how they can bring the food of that city into their own kitchens.

The recipes in Hong Kong Local aren’t the haute cuisine extravaganzas that Hong Kong feeds its high-end residents and plutocratic travelers. These dishes are street food offerings that can still to be found in the city’s dai pai dong and show up in congee shops, yum cha restaurants, and cha chaan teng. They’re uncomplicated and almost minimal, but all require the freshest ingredients and “a high level of attention and care.” 

Opening the book to Early, readers can begin their days with congee, Chinese doughnuts,and fresh soy milk. Heartier appetites are appeased with milk tea, beef noodles and sticky rice rolls while traditionalists are taken to the delights of dim sum: steamed pork ribs, dumplings, and sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves. 

Still hungry? How about a pastry? Egg tarts, pineapple buns, coconut tarts, sponge cake?  Hong Kong french toast--or soup? 

Moving on to lunch in Mid, Chan once again pays attention to appetites of varying capacities, with choices that range from snacks (bao and pork) to noodles, pepper steak, and fried rice, with mango soup, custards, and smiley cookies for dessert, washed down with a red bean crushed ice drink. This section moves along briskly; Hong Kong lunches aren’t lingering affairs--time is money, there’s shopping to be done,  business deals to close, and a number of people hovering nearby, waiting for empty  tables.

Late  slows way down with moveable feasts in the company of family and friends that can easily last for hours--and Chan’s recipes reflect that luxurious abundance. Steamed whole fish with soy and spring onion, cheesy lobster, typhoon shelter crab, oyster omelette, nine different poultry dishes that include the traditional salted baked chicken, fried morning glory with fermented bean curd--this is siu yeh, the fourth meal, and Hong Kongers make it count.

Chan charitably concludes with basic recipes and a glossary of ingredients along with where to find them, for everyone who’s not lucky enough to have a Hong Kong auntie at their disposal.

Hong Kong Local covers a lot of different bases. It’s a cookbook, a culinary guide to Hong Kong, and a godsend to people who live far from the Cantonese restaurants of America’s Chinatowns and hunger for the food they remember. And for those who know and love Hong Kong, it’s filled with neighborhood photographs that tease with their lack of captions and beckon with the welcome that this city is famous for. ArChan Chan’s recipes and Alana Dimou’s photographs provide the cheapest ticket to Hong Kong that’s ever been offered.

Chan, who left Hong Kong to perfect her culinary art in Australia, and who now is a noted chef in another food city, Singapore, is clearly homesick. Hong Kong Local is an invitation, a love letter, and a dazzling collection of burnished memories.~Janet Brown

In Search of Japan's Hidden Christians : A Story of Suppression, Secrecy and Survival by John Dougill (Kodansha)

The first Christian missionaries came to Japan in the 16th century, around 1549, and for nearly sixty years managed to convert over 300,000 Japanese. However, in 1612, by order of the Shogun, Christianity was banned throughout the country. If people were caught practicing this new religion, they were arrested and tortured. This sent the Japanese Christians into hiding. They called themselves Kakure Kirishitan.

For over two hundred years during Japan’s isolationist period, these hidden Christians continued to practice what they were taught even though they had no Bible and had no preachers to lead them. John Dougill wanted to know why did illiterate peasants continue to practice a form of Catholicism that was handed down to them from their parents, grandparents, and forefathers given the risk of death and persecution by the government. 

In Search of Japan’s Hidden Christians is the result of Dougill’s research. The book is part history, part travelogue as Dougill travels to the cities and regions where it all began, starting in Tanegashima and making his way to Kagoshima where the first Jesuit missionary, Francisco Xavier, brought the Bible to the Japanese. The journey would continue to Yamaguchi Prefecture, Nagasaki and the Goto Islands. 

Omura Sumitada was the first daimyo to convert to the new religion and was also the first to be baptized.  In 1580, he ceded Nagasaki to the Jesuits.  As the church was becoming more powerful, the Shogun realized the potential threat and in 1587, decreed that all missionaries were to leave the country. The Tokugawa Shogunate bans Christianity in 1612. Those who were caught still practicing the religion were arrested and tortured. However, many of the Kirishitans refused to renounce their faith.

The crucifixion of twenty-six Kirishitans was intended as a warning to others as to what would happen to them. “The impact of the crucifixions was not as the authorities had intended. Rather than intimidating the populace, the bravery of the martyrs’ deaths served to enhance the appeal of Christianity, as word spread that here was a faith worth dying for.” 

The government then changed their tactics and began to use the fumi-e. This was a picture which had the likeness of Jesus or Mary on it. Suspected Christians were to step on the image to prove they were not members of the banned religion. This was an effective method to get many Christians to apostatize.

Dougill ends his journey at the Dozaki Church located in the Goto Islands, the final refuge for the Christians who escaped execution, although they had to continue to practice in secret. On the island, there are still descendents of the Kakure Kirishitan who refuse to rejoin the Catholic Church, practicing their form of catholicism that was handed down from generation to generation. 

After Dougill completes his journey he comes to the conclusion that the “Hidden Christians were neither hidden nor as Christian as their name suggests. The faith had undergone many changes during the long years of persecution, as a result of which it had diverged so far from the original that it was often unrecognizable.” 

How strong is your faith? Would you be willing to die for your religion? Would you willingly go to your death as a martyr or would you publicly renounce the faith but practice it in private as many of the Kakure Kirishitans did? Although I am not an advocate of organized religion, I wonder how I would feel if I practiced a religion taught by my ancestors only to have someone tell me that I’ve been doing wrong all these years? What would you do? ~Ernie Hoyt