The Last Days of Old Beijing by Michael Meyer (Walker)




When Michael Meyer pieces together an eighteenth century map, commissioned by the Manchu emperor Quianlong to "record the outline of every building on every street" in China's capital city and that is printed today on 500 sheets of paper, the portion with his neighborhood alone fills his living room. It is also almost identical, he discovers, to the image captured by Google Earth's satellite, and on it is a house standing on the same spot as the house in which he lives.

Meyer lives on Red Bayberry and Bamboo Slanted Street,in a neighborhood of narrow lanes and low-built houses. Beijing was originally made up of neighborhoods like his, called hutong, a word that dates back to the days of Kublai Khan. His hutong is one of 114 found in Dazhalan, Beijing's oldest community. Dazhalan is the same size as Vatican City, but while the home of the Pope has a population of 557, Dazhalan has 57,000 residents, 1500 businesses, 7 temples, and 3,000 homes. It lies in the Old City of Beijing, "an area slightly larger than Manhattan...centered by the Forbidden City." Within this historic framework, the small residential universes of hutong are rapidly disappearing, being erased by the invisible--and universal-- bureaucratic entity that Meyer calls "The Hand."

The architectural wonders of modern-day Beijing are shown in breathtaking photographs in Vanity Fair and other upscale magazines, glorious buildings that make New York City look decidedly behind the times. The world's most noted architects are being used to turn a municipality that is larger than Connecticut into a city that will lead the world, while lesser known practitioners of architecture are designing high-rise suburban apartment buildings that will house those who are displaced by Beijing's new urbanity.

The hutong neighborhoods, such as the one that Meyer inhabits, are called "urban corners" or "villages in the city" by Beijing's city government, places with a "chaotic environment" that are fire hazards and potential breeding grounds for crime. They are horizontal neighborhoods that are being crowded out by the new vertical Object Buildings in what Beijing architect Zhang Yonghe calls "a City of Objects."

When Meyer describes his living conditions, it certainly seems that Beijing's urban planners have a point. His hutong home is two rooms in a crumbling courtyard house, in which the polished marble floor contrasts with the straw-and-mud walls, there is no inside plumbing, and electrical fuses are so easily blown that Meyer uses his refrigerator as a closet. His morning ablutions are performed under a cold-water faucet in the courtyard, and his first outing of the day is when he saunters to the men's latrine, which he says "is a route I have timed flat." The Big Power Bathhouse, a place where customers can drink a beer while they shower, or pay for the exfoliating services of an elderly gentleman who wields a mean scrubbing mitten, is Meyer's neighborhood hygiene center.

And yet while his living conditions are spartan, Meyer lives in a human community that is functional beyond belief, when judged by Western standards. In his neighborhood he is known as Little Plumblossom, the teacher who volunteers at the hutong elementary school, which is a four story building surrounded by so many different kinds of trees that Meyer's students cannot count them all, "a sea of grey and green." There is one hutong rule that all residents abide by, "Public is public; private is private," and it is so strictly adhered to that Meyer's security is maintained by a simple padlock. His neighbors become his friends, particularly "The Widow," a fierce chainsmoking woman in her eighties, who feeds Meyer with food and conversation. She loves the hutong, because living in it keeps her "feet on the ground" and "connected to the earth's energy" which she would lose by living in a high-rise apartment.

This is the world that is threatened by Beijing's modern transformation. Narrow lanes that connect the lives of those who live in them are being displaced by streets that are as wide as highways and virtually uncrossable by pedestrians. High-rise apartment compounds far from the core of Beijing have no courtyards in which communities can develop. Over-crowding is being replaced by severe isolation, and people who have lived in spaces that are almost medieval are being tossed into modern living conditions in a way that guarantees severe culture shock. This is a story that only a hutong resident could tell, and Michael Meyer presents it, warts and history and humor and all, with the perspective of a man who bathed under a cold-water faucet every morning for two years.


10:39 AM PDT Permalink |

The House on Dream Street by Dana Sachs (Seal Press)




It's easy to fall in love with a country--travelers do it all the time. It's far more difficult to extend that infatuation into a long-term relationship, as Dana Sachs discovers when she moves to Hanoi.

An independent American with a fledgling grasp of Vietnamese, Dana soon discovers that in her new home she has all the authority of a three-year-old child, coupled with the notoriety of Brittany Spears. Soon after her arrival she realizes "I would always stand out in a crowd--bigger, paler, and richer than everyone else." She is told about another American woman who had lived in Hanoi and was so besieged by attention that she retreated to her room and refused to leave until the day that she flew back to the States. Keeping this example in mind, Dana forces herself out into public view, learning to be comfortable within Hanoi's teeming streets and in the home of the family who rent her a room and slowly absorb her into their domestic scene.

She quickly learns key phrases, the most useful being "I don't know how to eat it." This, her Vietnamese friend, Tra, who has lived in America tells her, is a polite way to refuse unwanted food, and it rescues Dana from eating an egg that she thought was hardboiled but turns out to be a baby chick in embryo.

"You should try it. It's delicious," Tra tells Dana later, adding sympathetically that she had a similar experience in the States with mashed potatoes--"All that butter and cream--disgusting! How can people eat that?"

Learning the language helps build Dana's confidence and allows her to become closer to the family in whose house she lives. She enters a different time zone, spending hours sitting with her landlady Huong in a living room whose folding doors when opened exposed the entire room to the street. "It was hard," Dana remarks, "to know where the inside stopped and the outside world began." Sitting on a sofa that was almost on the sidewalk, Dana discovers how a public world can also be deeply personal, and how "relaxing" does not need to "involve some action verb." As they sit together Dana and Huong become friends and Dana becomes part of a small part of Hanoi.

Certain stereotypes persist. Dana continues to see Hanoi through a filter of past war stories, and many men of Hanoi continue to see her as an easy conquest, since she is of course American. A meeting with a man who claimed to have rescued John McCain when the downed pilot was floundering in Hanoi's Western Lake brings Dana to an unexpected affinity with Phai, a motorcycle mechanic, whose gentle kindness provides a restful sanctuary from an endless barrage of things to learn.

It's easy to fall in love with a man who in some ways personifies the country that she loves--it's far less easy, Dana discovers, to extend that infatuation into the same sort of long-term relationship that she has with Vietnam. And yet the attraction becomes a lasting friendship, as Vietnam becomes a second home, while changing over time as much as Dana and Phai do. The vivid and careful chronicling of Vietnam as it enters a new, peaceful, and prosperous century makes this book an important historical document as much as it is an engaging piece of travel literature that deserves to become a classic.


01:44 PM PDT Permalink |

All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim by James Fenton (Atlantic Monthly Press)




"Horrible" is James Fenton's assessment of contemporary journalism, a discipline that prevents reporters from writing as though "they are present at the events they are describing. And not only present--alive, conscious, and with a point of view."

These are also prerequisites for being a poet, which Fenton is, so he is well-prepared to practice what he calls "something that predates journalism," the narrative form that is "reporting in its natural state."

Rather than the recital of facts that come from the mouths of journalists, Fenton is obsessed with the details that give depth and color to a narrative, and it is his gift for finding small, particular, idiosyncratic features that gives his reportage strength. When he is without these, as he is in the portion of this book that is set in Korea,he ventures into Fire in the Lake territory, about which he says, "the purpose of the book seemed to be to warn you off the subject." When he encounters the right people, as he does in the Philippines when he meets Helen, an American Meryl Streep look-alike who has become so immersed in her chosen home that she speaks English with a Filipino accent, he gets to the bones of his story. And when he writes about a part of the world that has claimed him, as Southeast Asia has, he is opinionated, at times thoroughly obnoxious, and absolutely unbeatable.

A man with a passion for Cambodia, Fenton went to Saigon a week after the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, six days before the Americans left Vietnam. He had been to Vietnam before, where his English had been found wanting by a Viet Cong soldier when he had failed to respond to "How are you?" with the obligatory response "Fine thanks, and you?" He had been to a village on the border between Cambodia and Vietnam that was "a hypermarket of contraband" where every man, woman and child spent their time gambling,like "some allegorical town, say in the Pilgrim's Progress" while they waited for the Khmer Rouge to come and buy weapons. He had traveled through a village that had been destroyed by napalm, where he "noticed a pile of bananas that had been charred right through, although they preserved their original shape...like something discovered and preserved in Pompeii. The bodies had already been cleared away."

In Saigon as the city prepares for its fall, Fenton watches the appearance of the giant helicopters that complete the American evacuation as they darken the sky for hours, their noise "a fearful incentive to panic." The looting of the embassy begins as the last helicopters were landing on the roof and when Fenton enters the building he is greeted by "suspicious looks, so I began to do a little looting myself in order to show that I was entering into the spirit of the thing." When the liberating forces entered Saigon, their first view was of people laden with booty, which Fenton remarks, must have confirmed their belief in urban degeneracy.

Flagging down a tank with an NLF flag as it approaches the Presidential Palace, Fenton is hauled aboard and told to keep his head down. As the tank enters the palace gate and the immortality of history, its hitch-hiking poet observes "an extraordinary number of dragonflies in the air."

With the advent of peace the streets of Saigon became filled with the abandoned uniforms of the Saigon Army, "piles of clothes, boots, and weapons...so complete it looked as though their former occupant had simply melted into his boots;" stalls of looted goods whose chief customers, Fenton says, were the NLF, as well as the French residents of the city and journalists; billowing parachutes of various colors that sheltered impromptu cafes and "made the city utterly beautiful;" and the wives of military officers who took to the streets in protest when their husbands were sent away to reeducation camps where, rumor claimed, thousands had been killed.

If God is in the details, then James Fenton's writing must certainly qualify as some kind of sacred text. Read it and weep and pray that he may someday do this again.


11:46 AM PDT Permalink |

Mosquito by Roma Tearne (HarperCollinsAustralia)




In the most terrible times of history, fairy tales are born. Princes marry fair damsels despite all obstacles in stories that are told and retold during times of plague, starvation, and never-ending war. When daily living is hopelessly, helplessly, and routinely endangered, stories emerge that keep the human spirit alive, and survive to become enduring literature, as the works of both the Brothers Grimm and Pramoedya Ananta Toer have done. In this same tradition comes a breathtaking and beautiful first novel from Sri Lankan artist and writer, Roma Tearne.

Theo, a middle-aged writer and widower, returns to his native Sri Lanka after decades of British life, during a time when civil war is driving others away from this country. He explains his return as a search for sunlight, but in truth Theo leaves safety for danger because he believes that he has nothing left to lose. He is a man without emotion, frozen by grief, searching for words.

Nalini is a girl who has learned to live a silent life. After watching her father burn to death on the street, leaving only black dust for his daughter to touch, Nalini has found that lines drawn on paper are more comforting than words. She draws and paints unceasingly and when Theo, as a local celebrity, comes to speak at her school, Nalini discovers that he is someone whose image she wants to put on paper.

Caught first by her tenacity, then her talent, and then her beauty, Theo begins to look for Nalini's presence in his life. Commissioning her to paint his portrait, he is amazed by the new life and youthful eagerness that Nalini gives to his painted image. Slowly an affinity develops between the seventeen-year-old artist and the forty-five-year-old writer, one that is carefully observed and understood by Theo's manservant, Sugi.

As he watches the silent girl, whose "unhappiness had blotted out her light," and the grief-stricken middle-aged man, both take on renewed life when they are together, Sugi is frightened by what he sees and they refuse to acknowledge. "They are both such children," Sugi realizes, "The girl is too young, and he is too innocent." In a country where the sounds of the night can presage death,Sugi knows that Theo and Nalini hear only what will enhance the new world that lies between them, and that it is up to him to protect them--if he can.

Surrounding the enchantment that envelops this unlikely couple are people slaughtered in road ambushes, child soldiers who kill without pity, and corpses who have died from torture and are found hanging from trees. Falling in love in a landscape of unspeakable beauty, in a country where peace is an illusive luxury, "a place spiralling into madness," Theo and Nalini are brutally and terribly separated when,inevitably, what Sugi fears comes to pass.

Fairy tales endure, not because of their happy endings, or because of their triumphs of good over evil, or their messages that true love will conquer all. The strength of a fairy tale is found in the exaltation of the strength of the human spirit and the agony that it can withstand. What a fairy tale provides is the realization that it is possible to be damaged and then healed, homeless and then secure, and that the power of story can keep hope alive. Perhaps more than ever, people need the message found in a fairy tale. In Mosquito Roma Tearne brings that message to a world that seems to be going back to a dreadful future.


09:56 AM PDT Permalink |

Neon Tigers by Peter Bialobrzeski (Hatje Cantz)


There are some days when words just don't work their magic. Maybe it's a blockage caused by a bad cold or a week of thick and damp clouds or a small financial disaster--or maybe all three at one time. Or perhaps it's the depression caused by Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar followed by a 7.9 on the Richter scale earthquake in Sichuan. Whatever the cause, there's a sogginess of the mind as a result and even the most devoted print addict finds nothing appealing about any sentence on any page. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's a state that is very close to being in hell.

There are other ways to find diversions, a movie on dvd, music, a bottle of good Scotch, but for a biblioholic nothing is as satisfying as a comfortable chair and the weight of a book in hand. Yet sometimes when it comes to absorbing the content of printed words, "between the motion and the act falls the shadow" as that venerable bookworm T.S. Eliot memorably put it.

This is what big, expensive, glorious coffee-table books were invented for--the ones put on Christmas gift lists that are handed to affluent, generous relatives. They are the volumes that rest in splendor on the lowest shelf of the bookcase where their weight won't cause the entire structure to sag and crumble. They are the panaceas that should be kept with first aid kits and fire extinguishers under the label "for emergency use only." They are the books that we turn to when words fail us.

Richard and Mimi Farina once sang "Now in this age of confusion I have need for your company" and that is exactly the way I felt yesterday when I pulled Peter Bialobrzeski's Neon Tigers off the bookshelf and onto my lap. This man is a genius, an artist, and a magician who has taken a huge, unwieldy, outdated camera to Asia and has used it to transform urban landscapes that are often quite unlovely and unlovable into marvels of light and color and the stuff that dreams and fantasies are made of.

Bangkok's concrete gloom is wrapped in pink and violet light, the kind that envelops the city briefly before sunset and is captured to live forever in these pages. The playful geometry of a Mondrian painting lightens Singapore's grim efficiency, turning the city's buildings into patterns of delight and amazing beauty. Shanghai's canyons and pinnacles rival Manhattan's, taking on a grandeur that's usually found only in natural landscapes, while its elevated expressways float and curve and glitter like flying beasts of legend, hovering in a world of eternal l'heure bleu. The mass and power of Hongkong stands in stark contrast to its emerging rival, Shenzhen, which gleams with a newly-minted radiance and an alluring energy.

People are seldom seen. They appear quickly in a cluster of motorcycles on a Kuala Lumpur street, or as they wade in a park pool in that same city, with the greenery of their surroundings encircled by skyscrapers and construction cranes, or poised in fashionable affluence in a forest of Shanghai billboards. Humans are merely the extras in these pictures; buildings are the stars of a new world where the unnatural takes precedence over that which is natural This is,as Bialobrzeski says in a brief but eloquent essay, "a futuristic urban wonderland, where you feel you are part of a stage design for Blade Runner...which is incredibly fascinating and with all its contradictions makes you think."

This is what makes his work comforting in a time when there seems to be little comfort for many and when nature has turned upon those who have become its easy victims. What he admits can be seen as "the ultimate urban nightmare" is shown as the realized dream that these cities are, and the force of the natural world for an instant loses its frightening and destructive power. And suddenly, without words to intrude, we are able to take refuge for a moment in the magic of a pre-literate time, when fairy tales seemed as real to us as any other event that we were told of, and "ice-cream castles filled the air."

You can see some of Peter Bialorzeski's photographs for Neon Tigers at http://www.laurencemillergallery.com/bialobrzeski_exhibition.htm
01:13 PM PDT Permalink |

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (Weinsten Books)


Philip Hutton, half Chinese, half British, is caught between two powerful cultures and two dynamic families while feeling as though he belongs to neither. Told by a fortuneteller that he "was born with the gift of rain," the element that exists in the space between sky and earth and carries with it both life and destruction, he knows that is his own natural state--caught in the middle without a place that is truly welcoming--until a Japanese stranger enters his life.

Endo-san is a master of the martial art of aikijutsu, and Philip becomes his student. The harmony and balance of the practice, with its discipline over both body and mind, begins to provide a bridge between the divergent halves of Philip's life,while the friendship and guidance of Endo-san give him the attention that he has never known that he has missed. Slowly the resolution between the mental and the physical that he has learned in aikjutsu begins to permeate other parts of Philip's life, and the disparate elements of his mingled heritage start to cohere for him. Then the war begins, the Japanese invade Malaysia, the British abandon the country, and the world as Philip knows it falls into pieces. With the realization that his family is endangered and that his closest friend is an integral part of the invading forces, Philip begins to make choices that brand him as a traitor, lead to the death of people he loves, and haunt him for the rest of his life.

If it simply offered a passport to a time that has disappeared and a glimpse of the horror and the heroism that are spawned by war, The Gift of Rain does this so well that it would still be an unforgettable piece of fiction. Yet that is only part of what this book does. The Malaysian island of Penang, a piece of the world that both Philip's British and Chinese families are rooted to, is given a central place in this novel and is described in such powerful, evocative detail that it claims the heart of the reader as completely as it does Philip's. From the mouthwatering array of food on its streets, to the amazing diversity of its neighborhoods, to the magnificence of its prewar houses, to the sound of rain dripping from its trees, it is generously and wonderfully given form throughout the book.

So are the complexities of love in its many guises, the mystery of looking at someone never seen before with complete recognition, the question of past lives, and the torment of free will with its attendant curse of choice. Memory and loss, age and acceptance, duty and longing, these threads in the fabric of Philip Hutton's life are examined with such intelligence and grace that they transform this novel without ever threatening to overwhelm its story. This is the mark of a writer to watch; this is The Gift of Rain.


02:59 PM PDT Permalink |

The Latehomecomer by Kao Kalia Yang (Coffee House Press)


"What are you?" was a question frequently posed to Kao Kalia Yang when she was learning to talk. The answer, she quickly learned, wasn't "a name or a gender, it was a people."

"I am Hmong," she would reply.

Born in a Thai refugee camp, a child of two people who had met after fleeing to the Laos jungle when the Pathet Lao had deposed that country's monarchy, Kao and her family are in search of a home, as Hmong people have throughout history. From China to Laos, from fighting with Americans in Laos' "secret war" that accompanied the war in Vietnam to becoming the hunted prey of the victors that they had opposed, the Hmong once again found themselves on the move, carrying their history and culture within the minds of their people to a new country that would hold them and their shared identity.

For Kao and her family, the repository of history and culture is their grandmother, who is a shaman and a traditional healer. While in the refugee camps, Thai soldiers who guard the Hmong recognize her powers and come to her to cure their ailments, allowing her to go away from the confines of the camps and gather the plants that she uses in her remedies. She knows how to approach unseen worlds to call home the wandering spirits of living people who have been jarred too harshly by life. She is the one who holds ancient stories of the Hmong in her memory and teaches them to Kao and her sister.

After the family is sent to America, power within it shifts to those who are quickest to master English--except for the grandmother, who keeps her influence and her position as matriarch. In a strange country surrounded by a foreign language that she will never learn, she carries the knowledge of who her family is, and where they have come from.

When Kao becomes mysteriously ill, it is her grandmother's gift that saves her. "Grow beautiful in America," her grandmother tells her, and Kao obeys. As a student at the University of Minnesota, she begins to collect her grandmother's stories, while realizing that she will be the one who will carry the story of her grandmother's life--and death--to tell Hmong children who are born and grow up in America. She will be the one to carry her grandmother's own story, as well as the ones of people Kao never knew who lived and died in Asia, within her blood and bones.

It is not only Hmong children who benefit from this memoir. "I wanted the world to know how it was to be Hmong long ago, how it was to be Hmong in America, and how it was to die Hmong in America, because I knew our lives would not happen again." Through showing the world the life of her grandmother, Kao has revealed the life and history of a people, and all who read this book are richer for having received the gift of what she has written.
11:04 AM PDT Permalink |

Ant Egg Soup by Natacha Du Pont De Bie (Sceptre Books)


If you believe that one of the main reasons to travel is to find new things to eat and if your favorite souvenirs are recipes from the countries you explore, then Natacha Du Pont De Bie is going to be your new best friend. She's the kind of woman who goes to a country simply because she's intrigued by its food, "a tourist with an inquisitive nature and an empty stomach."

Discovering that there was only one book in print written in English about the cuisine of Laos, she tracked it down, found the man who published it, Alan Davidson,and learned that he as the former British Ambassador to Laos had been given a collection of royal recipes by the Crown Prince, shortly before the monarchy was dissolved by the Pathet Lao. That was enough to send Natacha to Laos, and in 2000 off she went with her copy of Traditional Recipes of Laos, determined to meet people who would show her how different contemporary Lao cooking was from that which had been set before the King.

Arriving in Vientiane just in time for lunch, she throws herself on the mercy of the man who stamps her passport in the airport and is immediately taken to eat raw laap. This may not be the most conventional introduction to Lao food for the beginner but Natacha loves it, telling both the reasons why and how to make it in kitchens far from Laos.

There are far too few books about traveling and eating in Laos, and for that reason alone this book stands out. But to recommend it on those grounds alone would be unfair to Natacha. She's a traveler who wants to go everywhere, eat everything, talk with her mouth full, peer over shoulders in every kitchen--and then tell stories about it all. She's not averse to drinking too much Beer Lao, or even more disastrously lao-lao, but is up the next morning to see what's for breakfast (coffee, bananas, rice balls, baguettes, honey, chili sauce, sticky rice and home-made papaya jam greet her during her first Lao hangover.)

She's the kind of woman who's never met a market she didn't like, and her journey through Laos is studded with descriptions of markets and how to cook the food that's sold there. And she's clever enough to go with people who can show her food that won't be found outside of Laos' national borders--like a sliver of wood called sa-khan that's put in stews and tastes "faintly metallic with a mere trace of clove" which,she says,"made the inside of my mouth tingle and zing" and gives plain water the flavor of lemon. Ant eggs have a mild, nutty flavor that prompts her to call them the "caviar of Laos" and she tells how to cook them, if you can find them frozen or canned. Or better yet, just follow in Natacha's footsteps and eat them in Salavan on the edge of the Bolaven Plateau. I certainly plan to--and I'll probably be there in the company of my battered and travel-worn copy of Ant Egg Soup.


04:12 PM PST Permalink |

The Girl from the Coast by Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Hyperion Books)


She was small and beautiful and only fourteen when she was taken from her seaside village in Java. Carried in the unfamiliar luxury of a carriage, wearing gold and clothes more elaborate than she had ever known before, she was given in marriage to an aristocrat in the city, a man powerful enough that he had no need to rouse himself from his afternoon nap to witness his new bride's arrival. So young that she had not yet begun her monthly cycles, married to a dagger that had represented her husband during the wedding ceremony, the girl was still a child, a fisherman's daughter who had been happy while living among wind, waves and boats and unaware that she was poor until the day that she was enveloped in wealth.

Bathed in perfume-scented water, adorned with rouge and kohl, in a house where her handmaiden is her only companion and her husband is a stern, soft-handed stranger, the girl becomes a stranger to herself, without a name and without an occupation. Her face is no longer her own, and her life is so truncated that she has no appetite for the food that is plentiful and delicious. Her freedom goes no farther than the garden wall that encloses the house she lives in, and she has lost the ability to give, since nothing that has been presented to her is truly hers. She is taught to recite the Koran by rote without understanding the words she recites, she learns to bake cakes, embroider, turn white cloth into batik. Her hands lose their roughness and her skin turns pale; her wishes are immediately granted by her servants but the girl knows the only real power rests with her husband. She understands that her presence in his house has no more significance than a chair or a mattress; she too is her husband's property. Her life, she realizes, will change only when she becomes a mother, and it does, in ways that she could never have imagined.

Her story has the magic of a fairytale and the power and resonance of a fable, yet it is true. It is one of the world's great writers' tribute to his grandmother, and to the strength and resilience of women who own nothing but their own characters. Imprisoned for his political beliefs for more than seventeen years, Pramoedya Ananta Toer wrote over thirty books and would have accomplished even more, were it not that some were destroyed by the Indonesian military. Among the books that were lost were the two volumes that would have turned this book into a trilogy tracing the history of Toer's family.

Standing alone, this is still a masterpiece. Through the story of an unnamed girl, Toer intertwines true facts with magic realism and offers up a whole world--of large injustices and small triumphs, of the value provided by closely knit communities and the loneliness that can come with affluence, and of the power of stories to keep spirits alive. This is a splendid introduction to a breathtaking body of work as well as a book that would have gained Toer acclaim if it had been the only one that he ever wrote.


07:33 AM PST Permalink |

The Fragile Edge by Julia Whitty (Houghton Mifflin)


In a world where any of us can go anywhere for the price of a plane ticket, there is one frontier that is for the most part unexplored, and uninhabited by human beings. It is a place filled with blazing colors, and sounds that seem to come from our deepest dreams, and intricate social structures. Only a handful of people have ever ventured to it--one of them, fortunately for those who love to read, is Julia Whitty, who has been to the depths of the Pacific Ocean and describes what she found there in words so vivid that no photographs are necessary.

The world of water is a world without our language and one that exists largely outside of our senses, Whitty explains. It's a place where humans have no words. "We smell nothing underwater (although the sea is filled with scents), taste only the metallic tang of compressed air, see poorly, and are reduced to nondirectional hearing; in effect we're disabled." What people experience in the depths of the sea "tends to be felt, rather than accurately remembered."

The coral reefs of the South Pacific atolls provide shelter for the aquatic communities that Whitty presents to her readers. The water is filled with dusky damselfish, "small strangely pugnacious gray fish," who serve as guardians of the coral by aggressively protecting their gardens of algae that grow upon the reefs. Tiny fish minister to larger ones in "cleaning stations," eating fragments of food found between predatory teeth or debriding the flesh of wounded fish, who wait in queues for the cleaner's attentions. Human divers who approach the cleaners "quietly, holding out some battered part" can also receive their services, which Whitty describes as "nibbles as tender as kisses." Plants that measure the tiniest fraction of an inch, glistening with bioluminescence, illuminate the fish that eat them and turn waves into "incandescent waterfalls of radiance."

This is a world where a moray eel can become a diver's familiar escort, where baby reef sharks are so appealing that people who know better are tempted beyond their strength to cuddle them like infants, and where the song of a distant humpback whale, Whitty says, is "less a sound than an itchy vibration in my bones and teeth." While "humans live by light," the ocean world is one that is ruled by sound, emitting a perpetual low hum that scientists believe could be the sound of storm energy that is converted to seismic waves, becoming "the conversation between the sea and the sky."

That conversation takes place "in an auditory realm far below human hearing." The sounds of this place that people are capable of hearing, made by aquatic mammals,are haunting, strangely familiar, and unforgettable.

Ironically, and quite horribly, it is sound created by humans that threatens the life of the ocean. The U.S. Navy's low frequency active sonar, used to detect submarines, "is the loudest sound ever put into the seas," loud enough to kill whales and dolphins by driving them too quickly to the ocean's surface and onto beaches in their attempts to escape the noise in the water.

It's an easy matter to destroy a world of which there is little awareness, and the world of the oceans has been a mysterious abyss to most land-dwellers since the beginning of time. It takes a book like The Fragile Edge to awaken us to the beauty and richness of another arena and to make us yearn to protect it. This book should be put in the hands of as many people as possible, and is one of five titles that have been shortlisted for the 2008 Kiriyama Prize. Like Rachel Carson's classic, "The Silent Spring," it's a literary feast that has the power to transform human thought and behavior through the magic of its writing.

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02:33 PM PST Permalink |

Dear Alice edited by Phyllis L. Thompson (Institute of East Asian Studies)


Letters from pioneers are always fascinating; it's perhaps the only time that voices of the poor and obscure are listened to as they record their efforts and adventures while breaking new ground. Today in the twenty-first century, with China in the forefront of global prosperity and progress, it's difficult to remember that less than twenty years ago, going to live in that country was for Westerners the equivalent to colonizing the dark side of the moon.

There are a number of people who went to live and work in China and who came away with books about their time there--Bill Holm, Rosemary Mahoney, Peter Hessler and Mark Salzman are only a few of the writers whose accounts of life in the Middle Kingdom are still being read today. Their books are well-written, painstakingly constructed, and carefully self-edited to become literary achievements, and as such, they do not reflect the raw, unvarnished experience of what it was (and in many ways still is) to make a life in Asia. To read the whole story, it's essential to find voices that are immediate, uncensored, and largely anonymous. It's essential to pick up a copy of Dear Alice: Letters Home from American Teachers Learning to Live in China.

In the 1980s, the Colorado Chinese Council began to send college graduates to teach English in universities throughout China. Far from home and reeling from a barrage of cultural differences, these teachers found a safety valve and a faithful correspondent in Alice Renouf, Council Director and a woman who is well aware of the joys and frustrations that come from living in Asia. To her, teachers could and did express the feelings and impressions that would be too worrying if divulged to their families. These letters, saved and collected by Alice, provide a realistic and deeply interesting picture of a diverse group of Westerners and their reactions to submitting to another culture.

Going "through the looking-glass" is an image that occurs often to people who come to live in Asia, and it is soon obvious that Lewis Carroll's Alice must have found that process painful. Writing to their own Alice, teachers quickly move from the "exotic postcard" quality of life in China to the inconvenient, inexplicable, often frustrating confusion that lies in wait to assail them when they least expect it. The picturesque street markets reek of fresh-killed meat, spacious apartments lose running water without warning for twelve hours a day, the air is filled one evening with spectacular exhibitions of fireworks for two hours which subside into a daily cloud of black dust that perpetually covers everything in sight. "Living in China," one teacher writes, "is a lot like camping," while another says, "It is frightening that we live better here than in the United States." These contradictory viewpoints are explained, buttressed and fleshed out by this well-edited collection of letters.

Although by the time that this book was envisioned, life had become much more materially comfortable for Chinese sojourners than it had been for Alice's earlier correspondents, the deepest underpinnings of these letters continues to assail Westerners in China. As Alice says, "Five thousand years of Chinese history and culture can hardly be extinguished by a little more than a decade of telephones, TVs, computers, e-mail, and an improved infrastructure." It is the difference in values that most confound the teachers of the 1980s, the "customs and mind-set," those things that are unchanged by Chinese people putting on Levis and eating at Colonel Sander's Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Shaped by a culture that extols individualism and plunged into a society based upon groups, Alice's teachers wrestle with the concept of guanxi,defined by one woman as "favors exchanged through networks of relationships and degrees of closeness," the ethics of sharing knowledge within the framework of a group when regarded through the "do your own work" prism of "cheating," the purely Western hunger for personal privacy that is regarded as irrational by many other parts of the globe. This is what plunges expatriates into culture shock, defined in this book as "nervousness in the face of a great unknown." By examining that nervousness while recognizing its importance in adapting to another way of looking at life, these letters and this book provides a touchstone that is of timeless value.

A handbook for anyone who has ever considered stepping away from the known world and discovering whether "there be dragons," Dear Alice is like exploring with a group of like-minded fellow travelers, facing the good, the bad, and the ugly together with sharp minds and good humor.


08:13 AM PST Permalink |

Bangkok Blondes by The Bangkok Women's Writers Group (Bangkok Book House)




Sporting heavily bleached hair extensions that were once silky, black strands on a Thai girl's head, learning how to rid an apartment of its resident ghost, finding a future husband at a market stall, eating lunch on Christmas Day with murderers and drug dealers--welcome to the world of the Bangkok Blondes.

They're not exclusively blondes, these articulate women who live in Bangkok, and they are definitely not the chick-lit purveyors that the title and cover of this anthology might imply. They are writers who give a multi-faceted and unstereotypical view of a city that they all know well.

For decades, books about Bangkok have been dominated by the perspective of the Barstool Buddhists, those old Bangkok hands who, to a man, have suffered at the soft and gentle hands of Thai girls and have lived to tell, and retell, the tale. (Notable exceptions to this school of writing are Colin Cotterill and Jim Eckardt, authors who have gone beyond the bar scene with praiseworthy literary results.) For a woman's take on Thailand's capital city, readers could choose either Carol Hollinger's classic Mai Pen Rai (Means Never Mind) or Karen Connelly's classic Touch the Dragon (published in the U.S. as Dream of a Thousand Lives). And that was all she wrote--until the Bangkok Women's Writers Group came along.

A collection of personal essays and fiction with a smattering of poetry, Bangkok Blondes provides an honest, idiosyncratic view of the eastern hemisphere's City of Angels. Jess Tansutat, the volume's sole Thai contributor says in her outstanding essay, The Butterfly Game, "For me, the "city of angels" seems to have just too many angels." She handles the difficulty of dating in Bangkok with objectivity, wisdom, and humor, and then the book moves on--no whining, no sniveling--to other facets of Bangkok life.

Pursuing fitness, braving the language barrier in a hair salon, working as an extra on a television commercial, making it past cultural hurdles with Thai boyfriends are stories that are fun to read but aren't unexpected topics. Examining Thai culture while driving in a city that has taken the traffic jam to an art form, playing the Bangkok version of Russian Roulette by riding side-saddle on the back of a motorcycle taxi, living with a statue of the Buddha that's taken on a disconcerting life of its own, undergoing colonic therapy, braving the wild confusion of Romanized Thai and English that has been thoroughly reinvented: these are all things that could only be written by people with open minds and hearts who have willingly submitted to another culture, and that make this collection one to seek out and read.

The pure joy of a book like Bangkok Blondes is discovering new voices. The frustration of it is longing for more from particular voices--Martha Scherzer, Chloe Trindall, Jess Tansutat, Zoe Popham are all writers who should be working on their very own books. But this is only one opinion. Every reader of Bangkok Blondes will discover her own favorite writer--like a box of good chocolates, this book has a wide variety of choices and something for every taste.


09:53 AM PST Permalink |

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra (HarperCollins)






Nobody knows why Ganesh Gaitonde, a man who controls at least half of the underworld in Bombay, would choose to give himself up to a lowly police inspector like Sartaj Singh--least of all Sartaj himself. Nobody knows why Gaitonde has sequestered himself in a concrete building that resembles a cube, why he tells Sartaj the story of his criminal beginnings while the police lay siege to the bunker, and why the body of a woman lies beside Gaitonde's corpse when Sartaj reaches the heart of the stronghold. And nobody knows why agents from India's foreign intelligence agency, RAW, take charge of the post-mortem scene and order Sartaj to ferret out the details that will explain the inexplicable.

Sartaj, a man who was once chosen by a women's magazine as one of "The City's Best-Looking Bachelors," is in the throes of a full-blown midlife crisis, "past forty, a divorced police inspector with middling professional prospects…just pedaling along, doing his job." He's lost his youthful belief that he could "hold the whole city in his heart." When he begins to investigate the life and death of one of the most powerful men in India, his own life starts to expand as he uncovers other people's secrets.

Bombay is a city filled with people who have moved there to recreate themselves, and secrets are perhaps its most valuable currency, upon which power rests. Everyone—the beautiful movie star whose photographs fuel magazine sales, the woman who was Gaitonde's best friend for years without ever meeting him face-to-face, Sartaj's professional mentor who has known him since childhood, Sartaj's mother—has an untold history that forms the base of their visible lives.

As Sartaj explores the mysteries that surround the death of Gaitonde, he is led deep into the heart of Bombay, into his own heart, and into a world beyond, where corruption and greed can lead to annihilation. The mythic life of Gaitonde becomes smaller and more human, while other forces stretch beyond India's borders, and the terror of 9/11 presages the end of the Kaliyug period.

While Sartaj's investigation takes shape, so does the city that he lives in. Vikram Chandra has a Dickensian skill for bringing life to a multitude of characters who at first seem to be a random cluster, but who fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. When all of their stories fall into place, piece by piece Bombay is brought into being—its dark corners, its blaze of vitality, "the jammed jumble of cars, and the thickets of slums, and the long loops of rails, and the swarms of people, and the radio music in the bazaars." This book is far more than a subcontintental version of The Godfather, or the middle-aged love story of Sartaj, a wounded romantic who learns that "to be rescued from one’s foolishness was the greatest tenderness." It’s a portrait of Bombay, of Mumbai, and to read it is to "hold the whole city" in your hands and perhaps in your heart.


10:55 AM PST Permalink |

Hot Sour Salty Sweet by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid (Artisan)




Travel is a bottomless pit of addiction, airline tickets are expensive, and carbon footprints are becoming an overriding concern for many who used to hop on a plane without a qualm. Faced with these incontrovertible facts while feeling the distinct symptoms of what in some parts of the world is called "cabin fever," what is a wanderlust-plagued and housebound creature to do? Pick up a cookbook, of course--but not just any cookbook.

For desperate times like these, it's essential to turn to Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, the husband and wife who have spent more than twenty years roaming the world with their two children, their cameras, their culinary curiosity and their spirit of adventure. They choose a spot and move in, exploring it through its food--eating, making friends with cooks, and then learning from them. These are not slash-and-burn adventurers; they are pioneer practitioners of Slow Travel and when they leave a place, they take with them far more than recipes. Any cookbook that comes from Alford and Duguid is a finely distilled mixture of stories and photographs that brings an entire world to their readers, rather than a simple collection of exotic dishes and how to prepare them. To open any of their books is to embark on an adventure that is almost as satisfying as making a real-life journey, and to feast upon words and images that are every bit as seductive and as satisfying as the food that they describe.

Anyone who turns the first page of Hot Sour Salty Sweet is immediately carried off on a journey along the Mekong river, swept through China's province of Yunnan, into Burma's Shan State, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia, ending in Vietnam, where the river meets the sea. While following the river, Duguid and Alford find " a shared approach to food, as well as a common palate" among the people of these widely divergent cultures. The countries of the Mekong are tied together by a common thread. "Food is for fun, for joy."

Food is celebrated in these pages, and through this festive approach toward nutritional fuel is a celebration of the places and people who produce it. Although there is no recipe for fish heads and fat, Jeffrey Alford's story of being the only man in a group of several hundred Chinese women who spent the day rhythmically chanting in a dry riverbed, stopping at midday to picnic on a fish head and a chunk of fat washed down with tea, leaves an unforgettable image and questions that inevitably lead to cultural exploration. If readers want to know how the fish heads were prepared, or what kind of fat was eaten, that particular journey of discovery is left for them to pursue. What Alford makes clear is the welcoming and generous hospitality that allowed him to be part of something that otherwise would never be part of his experience, which is what every traveler yearns for.

That same generosity permeates every part of this food odyssey. Noodles are photographed only after the photographer has spent hours watching soaked rice being ground between two millstones by hand, to turn to flour, then a wet dough, then squeezed through holes in a bag into boiling water to become "beautiful white coils." The fish in a photograph was probably caught between the palms of two agile hands in a pond, and the smiling child who is embracing a chicken will doubtless eat it with equal happiness soon. Duguid and Alford's own children are awakened early one morning in Northern Laos by a water buffalo peering at them through the door of their hotel room, in a town where they will later breakfast on freshly made noodles at a market stall--and then a recipe is given to bring the flavor and fragrance of a Laos breakfast to a table somewhere on the other side of the world.

This is a cookbook that may never be used in a kitchen. It's the kind of book that captures readers for hours and then sends them away from their sheltering walls, ravenous and eager to explore their corner of the world for its own particular sights and scents and explosions of taste.


12:33 PM PST Permalink |

Smile When You're Lying by Chuck Thompson (Holt Paperback)




I love to travel, I love to eat, and I love reading magazines. Staring at the passing landscape from a comfortable train seat and contemplating my next meal, with a small stack of glossy magazines close at hand, is what I hope awaits me after death if I behave myself in this life. Obviously I must be an indefatigable fan of those magazines that are devoted to food or travel, right?

Wrong. Heaven knows I’ve tried to read them. I’ve even bought a few, seduced by their glorious photographs, but every time I’ve gotten past the images, my eyes glaze over, my brain becomes paralyzed from the non-stop barrage of adjectives, and I begin to long for something else to read-- perhaps the back of a cereal box or the label on a bottle of aspirin.

If this sounds a trifle harsh, let me assure you it is mild compared to the blazingly funny critique of travel writing offered by Chuck Thompson, a man who has made his living for years writing for and about "the world’s second-largest commercial enterprise." He’s also a writer who has left most of his best stories unwritten, to be told only in the presence of alcohol and in the company of good friends—until now.

A boy from Juneau, Alaska, Thompson grew up surrounded by the tourist industry and its over-used superlatives. It doesn’t take too many encounters with phrases like "spectacular glaciers" and "the charm of the Gold Rush" or one or two cruise ships filled with souvenir-buyers to turn any lad into a cynic and a traveler who knows that whatever is being touted should probably be ignored, whether it’s described by a glossy brochure or Lonely Planet.

Chuck Thompson is all that and a fine writer too. He opens his book with what promises to be just another story about a Bangkok blowjob bar that is going to substitute one set of clichés for a cluster that is equally time-worn but oh so edgy, and then makes it completely original and entirely his own with his closing sentence. And right from that beginning, when they are whisked away from the perils of reading a watered-down William Vollmann, readers know that they are in for a good time—because the author certainly is.

Thompson is a force to be argued with, and there are going to be many moments when his readers long to do that. Freed from the advertorial school of magazine writing, he never loses an opportunity to voice an opinion or to describe an encounter that’s just a wee bit on the seamy side and guaranteed to make the most politically correct choke on their decaf soymilk lattes while laughing. "It’s a shame," he admits, "but the fact stands that potential sodomy is more entertaining than clement weather, reliable public services, and obedient citizenry." Yup, that it is, when it’s a story told by someone who knows how to tell it, as is the one about writing a letter for an aging lady of dubious virtue on an idyllic Thai island or another that explains why a Japanese friend was nicknamed "Firehose."

Although it’s quite possible that he may not live to write a follow-up, because if Paul Theroux hasn’t put out a contract on him, certainly Lonely Planet will, Chuck Thompson has created a whole new spectrum of travel writing and a book that you can give to everyone on your holiday gift list—or at least for all who already have been endowed with a sense of humor.


01:06 PM PST Permalink |