Stephen Hong Sohn's Blog, page 50

February 27, 2015

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for February 28, 2015

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for February 28, 2015

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

In this post, reviews of Claire Tham’s The Inlet (Ethos Books, 2013); The Sound of Sch: A Mental Breakdown, A Life Journey (Ethos Books, 2014); Dave Chua’s The Girl Under the Bed (illustrated by Xiao Yan) (Epigram Books, 2013); Cheah Sinann’s The Bicycle (Epigram Books, 2014); Marie Matsuki Mockett’s Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (W.W. Norton, 2015); S. Li’s Transoceanic Lights (Harvard Square Editions, 2015); Ravi Mangla’s Understudies (Outpost 19, November 2013); Tess Gerritsen’s Die Again (Ballantine, 2014).

A Review of Claire Tham’s The Inlet (Ethos Books, 2013).

Highly recommended from a former student of mine and occasional reviewer to Asian American Literature Fans, I was extremely excited to begin reading Claire Tham’s The Inlet, which comes out of another wonderful Singaporean publisher, Ethos Books:

http://www.ethosbooks.com.sg/store/index4.html

Tham’s The Inlet is something of a noir. Told in shifting third person perspective, the novel begins with the story of a young Chinese woman named Ling, who is stationed in an outlying Chinese city, which is beginning a rapid modernization process. This woman works in a science laboratory; she’s part of a dispossessed and growing middle class that realizes that there is little chance for any further upward mobility. She breaks off a relationship with her boyfriend, even though he seems to be a decent prospect, but it becomes apparent that Ling has much more on her mind: the desire to change her life radically, to find adventure, to do something different with her life than live on the meager paycheck of a mediocre job with little chance of advancement. A chance encounter with another woman allows her the opportunity to travel to Singapore to work as a kind of hostess for wealthy men. Having seen the tremendous affluence displayed by the urban elite, Ling, who is clearly both beautiful and intelligent, sees the offer as the potential route toward another life and she accepts. From there, the novel takes a much darker turn: a body is found, floating lifelessly in the pool on a property owned by a very prominent Singaporean business magnate (Willy Gan). The body is unfortunately IDed as Ling’s. The novel’s title refers to the very exclusive residential community known as The Inlet, a place reserved for the affluent and the privileged. The ASP (the assistant superintendent) Cheung Fai is assigned to the case and soon the list of possible suspects begins to be fleshed out, which include the young Indian immigrant teenager who finds the body (Sanjana), the woman who brought Ling over to Singapore (Ms. Fung), Willy Gan, and his favorite nephew, Jasper Gan, who was purportedly having a sexual liaison with Ling on the night before her body is found. Tham’s use of the shifting third person narrative perspective allows her the opportunity to present a kaleidoscopic view of Singapore, with individuals ranging from the uber-rich (such as Willy Gan) to others such as a poor Chinese cook who is found murdered, but whose death draws little publicity (in contrast to the salacious undertones to the Inlet drowning). Tham also provides important back stories to the main suspects through tracking the relationships of such characters through their wives or girlfriends. The main suspect seems to be a mystery man named Merrill Lynch, a man that Ling was dating prior to her death, but who no one else who had worked with her had ever actually met. The third person perspective allows us the opportunity to get to know Merrill Lynch, who is none other than Min Liang, a successful businessman, who courts and later falls in love with Ling. Min Liang is an interesting figure because he, along with Jasper Gan, represent individuals whose fortunes are essentially lost in the global economic downturn that occurred in 2007-2008. Tham uses these narratives as microcosms for a kind of nation-state critique levied on neoliberal economic policies that has turned Singapore into a wealthy country, but one necessarily plagued by the amorality of business cultures and the relentless pursuit of the bottom line. Ling, in some respects, with her laissez faire attitude comes off as a strange rebel figure, finding comfort in floating on the unexpected and unplanned currents of her life. Tham’s greatest strength in this narrative is the unsentimental depictions: characters’ flaws strike the reader with their rawness. The conclusion is sure to rankle those expecting a traditional mystery to solved, but readers should be forewarned that Tham is operating within the confines of the noir genre and in noir, there are no heroes and deaths can never be simply explained.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.ethosbooks.com.sg/store/mli_viewItem.asp?idProduct=324

A Review of Danielle Lim’s The Sound of Sch: A Mental Breakdown, A Life Journey (Ethos Books, 2014)

The second book I picked up from Ethos Books was Danielle Lim’s The Sound of Sch: A Mental Breakdown, A Life Journey, labeled as a creative nonfiction and which takes a rather direct look at the issue of mental illness as it affects one family. The official page provides a useful synopsis: “The Sound of Sch (pronounced S-C-H) is the true story of a journey with mental illness, beautifully told by Danielle Lim from a time when she grew up witnessing her uncle's untold struggle with a crippling mental and social disease, and her mother's difficult role as caregiver. The story takes place between 1961 and 1994, backdropped by a fast-globalising Singapore where stigmatisation of persons afflicted with mental illness nevertheless remains deep-seated. Unflinchingly raw and honest in its portrayal of living with schizophrenia, The Sound of Sch is a moving account of human resiliency and sacrifice in the face of brokenness.” Lim makes an interesting aesthetic move by choosing to use present tense narration, providing the story a sense of intimacy and access. Though set in the past, this narrative achieves a kind of poignancy and immediacy as we move through the years with the protagonist. The most deeply troubled character seems to be Lim’s mother, who is tasked with the burden of taking care of Lim’s uncle: to make sure he continues going to his job (sweeping and cleaning the local police station), to locate him anytime he goes missing, and to continue to help him on a path that allows him to live a semi-autonomous life. This constant vigilance takes its toll. As Lim notes, “Mum starts tearing as she goes on, Why must I suffer like this? My parents shouldn’t have had me, they were so old already when I was born and I’ve to look after my brother, 20 years already! 20 years! Why did my mother refuse treatment for him back then? Why? The doctors told her he could get well if treated but she won’t believe” (76). Lim’s mother medicates herself with painkillers, which seem to be her crutch and the method by which she deals with the constant stress. The situation becomes complicated toward the conclusion of the memoir when Lim’s grandmother becomes critically ill and attempts suicide. Through so much familial upheaval, Lim finds a way to see the humanity of her uncle: “I look at him sitting at the table, between the certificates on his left and ashes on his right, between the past on his let and the present on his right, between success on his left and brokenness on his right, between the hope of a bright future, on his left, and the courage to keep going, on his right. My uncle. An ordinary man. Some would say an unsuccessful man. Many would say, a mad man. But for me, I will remember him with his smile and the small, beautiful sounds he has echoed into my life” (153). For Lim, the importance of this work is in de-pathologization, that though some would consider her uncle a life wasted, she knows his value emerges far beyond the ominous shadow of expectations. In this reorientation, Lim teaches us much about familial bonds and the need to recognize the complex situations faced by all those touched by mental illness.

Buy the Book Here:

http://ethosbooks.com.sg/store/mli_viewItem.asp?idProduct=353

A Review of Dave Chua’s The Girl Under the Bed (illustrated by Xiao Yan) (Epigram Books, 2013).

I continue on with my review series with Epigram Books, as I tackle more of their graphic novels! In this installment, I review Dave Chua’s The Girl Under the Bed (illustrated by Xiao Yan) (Epigram Books, 2013). For those familiar with the terrain of Chinese culture, you’re well aware of something called the Ghost Month (for some excellent novels set during this period, you MUST read Ed Lin’s Ghost Month and Alvin Lu’s The Hell Screens), which falls on the seventh month of the lunar calendar. During this month, the divisions between the realms of the living and the dead begin to disintegrate, allowing ghosts more mobility. To placate these ghosts, altars, sacrifices, and food and liquor offerings are left out, while others burn something called hell money for spirits to spend in the afterlife. It seems to be a big party for the ghosts, who can still wreak havoc on the lives of the living. In Chua and Yan’s graphic novel, this month is the perfect grounds to set a childhood tale of haunting. Our protagonists are the young Jingli and her friend Weizhong, who apparently is a spirit medium. Jingli discovers during ghost month that there is a girl under her bed (thus the title). Her name is Xiaomei (this name has been used so often in Asian American books that I know the name means little sister LOL) and she knows very little about her former life. Jingli, with the help of Weizhong, are determined to get to the bottom of the mystery of the girl and her former life; they even visit a kind of spiritual mystic located in a strange wooded area in Singapore. After the visit, which also involves surviving a potential goring by a wild boar, they return and discover the more sinister background of the ghost and that her history may involve a man who has revealed that the ghost may in fact be his daughter. From this point, the graphic novel moves very quickly to the finish. Though Chua doesn’t deviate much from the classic revenge tales accorded to ghosts, the story is still entertaining and filled with flourishes of originality. The friendship between Jingli and Weizhong is an excellent grounding apparatus for the story, and the graphic novel pulls off the appropriate pacing. Chua and Yan should be applauded for their storyboarding; they often use panels without any texts at all, leaving the reader much more room to interpret the events occurring. Yan’s illustrations have a manga-like quality that is sure to pull in readers who enjoy such cultural productions. Certainly, The Girl Under the Bed is a story that can be consumed by readers of all ages and is a thrilling addition to the world of Asian Anglophone graphic novels.

Buy the Book Here:

http://shop.epigrambooks.sg/products/the-girl-under-the-bed

A Review of Cheah Sinann’s The Bicycle (Epigram Books, 2014).

So, Cheah Sinann’s The Bicycle is another wonderful graphic novel that has come out of Epigram Books, one of two Singaporean publishers that I’ve been interested in and thus working through as much of their catalogue as I can. The website provides a useful synopsis here (much better than I could probably render in any case): “In one of the last remaining jungles in Singapore, an old bicycle is unearthed in an archaeological dig. Its discovery brings the elderly Lim Ah Cheng back to a time when he rode with his life on the line… Meticulously researched by the creator of Singapore’s first daily comic strip The House of Lim, cartoonist Cheah Sinann, The Bicycle tells the tale of Toshiro Iwakura, an aristocratic, battle-hardened private haunted by his desire to cycle in the Olympics, and five-year-old street urchin Ah Cheng, who dreams of nothing more than learning how to ride a bike. Their paths cross during the Japanese Occupation, when a unique bond formed over two wheels is quickly put to a life-or-death test.” The protagonist is none other than Lim Ah Cheng and the old bicycle is the impetus for the graphic novel’s use of analepsis. Indeed, much of the graphic narrative is told in flashback, as the owner of the bicycle makes a case for why it is such an important historical object. On a purely functionalist level, the bicycle was vital in the Japanese colonial campaign, as soldiers used them to get from one place to another, especially in the absence of cars or trains. During the Japanese occupation period, Ah Cheng is orphaned and when he sees a caravan of Japanese soldiers riding through the town, he is naturally interested in their masculinity and their paternal characteristics. He bonds quickly with Toshiro Iwakura, who promises him to teach him how to ride a bicycle. In another flashback, we discover that Iwakura himself lost the love of his life before joining the military. His belief in this kind of love pushes him to treat women differently than say some of his military counterparts, who follow along with the rape and pillage philosophy. Iwakura is the quintessential anti-hero in this sense. Given the common narrative of Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia as a particularly brutal story meted out on the lives and bodies of millions of civilians, Iwakura’s portrayal is in some ways a daring and nuanced one. Iwakura eventually comes to see Ah Cheng beyond his status as a street urchin, a fact that can only be rationalized through Sinann’s appropriate use of analepsis. We know Iwakura finds himself unmoored in Singapore; the attentions of a brothel madam is in part what helps him survive (later, this madam will also be instrumental in Ah Cheng’s survival). The conclusion is particularly harrowing, but reveals a more textured portrayal of a Japanese serviceman in the course of violent empire, something reminiscent of the depictions offered by Sabina Murray in her equally harrowing (but no less brilliant) short story collection The Caprices. The visuals are quite effective, but the one quibble I have is actually the use of what looks to be computer generated dialogue text. While my guess is that the use of computer programs to create the fonts and the choices for text style in dialogue and caption bubbles has been common for some time, there is an artificiality to the font style that detracts from the overall presentation. But don’t like this minor critique stop you from enjoying this wonderful graphic novel, which looks to Singapore’s not too distant past and the still reverberating effects of the colonial occupation period.

Buy the Book Here:

http://shop.epigrambooks.sg/products/the-bicycle

A Review of Marie Matsuki Mockett’s Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (W.W. Norton, 2015).

I was excited to see that Marie Matsuki Mockett had published the follow-up to her promising first novel, Picking Bones from Ash. In Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (W.W. Norton, 2015) Mockett ventures into the creative nonfiction genre. This work is part biography, part memoir, part ethnography, and part history in its exploration of Mockett’s ancestral lineage and its connection to an area near Fukushima prefecture, the location that would be most affected by the 2008 tsunami that hit Japan and critically damaged nuclear reactors, while also killing thousands of residents in the coastal areas. Mockett’s extended family is connected to the area because they own a Buddhist temple there. Just two years prior, Mockett’s father had died, leaving her to ponder her familial background. Additionally, she is raising a young child and thus finds herself wondering about what he will come to know of this longer family history related to Buddhism. Thus, Mockett embarks on a longer project, one that involves traveling to Japan, writing a book and participating in a documentary focused on the religious and spiritual rituals, especially connected with Buddhism and the rites of the dead. The creative nonfiction is largely nonlinear. Though Mockett’s visits to Japan and her time participating in the documentary, as well as her explorations of Buddhist temples, sects, and cultures commands the great bulk of the narrative, she also spends time grounding the reader in the historical roots of Buddhism in Japan. She further functions as a kind of an unofficial documentarian related to the aftereffects of the tsunami. Mockett often accompanies Buddhist monks, as they acts as healers to devastated communities, listening the to traumatic stories of those individuals who were killed in the tsunami. Mockett comes to realize that pivotal place of Buddhism, even in a society long known for its modernization and its focus on technology and the future. Even amid the great death and destruction, Mockett comes to observe the vivid and vibrant lives in the areas hardest hit by the tsunami and the nuclear reactor damage. There are some extraordinarily beautiful passages grounded by Mockett’s intensely introspective authorial voice: we know that her experiences in Japan are highly spiritual, existential inquiries into the afterlife, so every moment seems to have a poetic gravitas that can be breathtaking. An intricately wrought, patiently crafted creative nonfiction from Mockett.

Buy the Book here:

http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Where-the-Dead-Pause-and-the-Japanese-Say-Goodbye/

A Review of S. Li’s Transoceanic Lights (Harvard Square Editions, 2015).

S. Li’s debut novel Transoceanic Lights (Harvard Square Editions, 2015) is told from the first person perspective of an unnamed narrator (for the most part), who is part of three different nuclear families who are immigrating to the United States. Each family has been sponsored by a rich relation, and their journey to the United States is naturally fraught with the challenges that come with a drastic move to a radical and alien new culture. Early on in the novel, the three families must share a small apartment, thus revealing the impoverishment of these immigrants. Soon, the families attend to getting jobs, enrolling their children in schools, and not surprisingly, the fractures begin to emerge. The unnamed narrator’s parents, for instance, bicker incessantly. The father spends much time at work struggling to make a living wage, while the mother finds herself increasingly disillusioned by their desultory life in the United States. Having believed that their move would somehow offer more opportunities, the mother-character comes to see how idealistic this dream has been; she spends much of her time in an escapist realm of music. The narrator finds himself adrift in the Chinatown school system, attempting to find his place among an often unruly set of students. Of course, not surprisingly, as the new kid, he eventually gains the unwanted attention of a bully, while suffering other complications when he is involved in a car accident in which a classmate is run over by a car (but fortunately survives). Such events are all part of the growing pains that Li depicts at all levels: the father, the mother, and the son all face particular obstacles which make their American acculturation far from easy. The added addition of a new family member, a girl, offers some hope in the guise of the reproductive future. But when the narrator’s father is in a car accident and breaks his arm, thus making insecure the one stable source of income, things look particularly bleak. Additionally, the mother’s father (called Old Man in the novel) appears to be dying, and her desire to go back to China to visit him before he passes becomes yet another source of marital acrimony. Though things seem to be quite dim for the family’s future, tensions and conflicts still somehow manage to get resolved. Here, Li gestures to the importance of extended kinship systems—riddled as they are with issues related to jealousy and favoritism—to help support immigrants in times of trouble. Li’s writing is often poetic, but the novel’s pacing and structure is quite uneven. There are times when it’s unclear who is narrating, whether or not certain moments are internal monologue or being spoken out loud, thus marring an otherwise compelling debut.

Buy the Book Here:

http://harvardsquareeditions.org/portfolio-items/transoceanic-lights/

A Review of Ravi Mangla’s Understudies (Outpost 19, November 2013).

Ravi Mangla’s Understudies comes out from yet another cool indie press. More information about the press can be found here (note the tagline: “innovative and provocative reading to get a sense of their catalog):

http://www.outpost19.com/

After I initially completed the novel, I first considered Mangla’s Understudies in relation to other cultural productions: think Pamela Lu’s Pamela, Geraldine Kim’s Povel, and Tao Lin’s general oeuvre and you have a strong sense of Mangla’s disjointed narrative styling, too diffuse to call standard postmodern writing, but certainly inspired by some of its dominant features (including the sense of existential ennui that pervades the narrator). Told in the first person perspective, the website chooses to describe the novel like so: “A high school teacher begins to question the course of his life after a famous young actress moves into town. In the starlet's shadow, his girlfriend, his mother, his neighbor, and his students take on strange new dimensions. Told in a series of snapshots, UNDERSTUDIES presents a sharp, funny, and heartbreaking study of beauty, celebrity, and everyday needs.” The reference to the starlet is an interesting one because it is part of what Mangla’s work an actual novel rather than some asynchronous, experimental text (or completely random prose “snapshops”). The narrator often employs the starlet’s various adventures both in real life and on screen as a riffing apparatus to consider the mundane and not-so-mundane things going on his life. He’s constantly wondering about the relationship between reality and representation, a kind of philosophical thought process that bleeds over into his own romance to Missy. This relationship seems to be stagnating. The draw of the starlet is her dynamic mode of existence: she appears as a social activist, in different acting roles; she is the object of fantasies (not only from the narrator, but also from a semi-creepy stalkerish neighbor). The narrator’s life with Missy seems to be the exact opposite: generic, lacking political complexity or texture, and utterly pedestrian. The narrator is a kind of counterculture throwback high school teacher, who joins a band made up of students. Not surprisingly he achieves high evaluation scores even with what some would call unexpected pedagogical practices and approaches. The narrator’s mother runs a web-based advice column that becomes an important element to the novel’s conclusion. The apotheosis of the states of disconnection appears when the narrator creates a faux e-mail account to get advice from his own mother about what to do with his life, which has become a sort of hollow construct. The answer, which I found to be surprisingly conservative and perhaps even verging on the trite, places Mangla’s work back into the orbit of the comedy-romance, thus articulating the centrality not so much of the starlet but actually of his relationship to Missy. How does one make something old become new again, Mangla seems to be asking. Both form and context seem grounded by the question; though Understudies does not seek to answer that question, it certainly meditates upon it in an unexpected, stream-of-consciousness narrative sure to entertain by the sheer quirkiness of its execution.

For more on the book, go here:

http://www.outpost19.com/Understudies/index.html

A Review of Tess Gerritsen’s Die Again (Ballantine, 2014).

For all the critique that can be levied at popular genres like the detective/ mystery, one would be hard-pressed to find a way to undercut authors who clearly excel at the finding the appropriate alchemy of pacing, plotting, and tension to produce a compelling and “unputdownable” story. Tess Gerritsen manages to complete this task with every installment of the Rizzoli & Isles series, and it’s not a surprise that this series has found a successful life on television as well. Our two protagonists: Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles have disparate personalities and come from very different backgrounds, but these opposites attract in the best way possible when it comes to solving crimes, particularly involving gruesome killers. Gerritsen makes consistent use of an intercut narrative aesthetic in her mysteries. She brings that back here as the novel opens in Africa. Our narrator, Millie Jacobson, is on a backcountry safari and hunting group with her mystery novel writing husband Richard Renwick. Their marriage is going down the tubes, and this vacation is perhaps the last gasp in a dying union. Millie finds herself drawn to the leader of the hunting expedition, a serious man by the name of Joseph Posthumus, while her husband flirts with two young blondes on the trip: Vivian and Sylvia. There is also Mr. and Mrs. Matsunaga; another young man by the name of Elliott (who had met with Vivian and Sylvia at a bar previous to booking the trip); Clarence, a back woods hunting guide and assistant to Joseph. All of those who came to the trip had booked it through a website called Lost in Botswana, but the trip takes a turn for the grisly when one morning Clarence is found dead, with only a few body parts left from what the hyenas had scavenged. When Joseph suggests that the group return early to the site that picked them up, the group is actually more adamant about continuing on the trip, but they end up being stranded anyway when the car does not start. So begins a gruesome sequence of events in which Millie Jacobson seems to be the sole survivor. The other narrative involves Jane and Maura investigating a series of ritualized murders that may or may not be connected. A taxidermist, Leon Gott, is found trussed up to the ceiling, hung as if on display. Medical examiner Maura is quick to note three markings on Gott’s bones that suggest a ritualized form of murder that might link his death with a Jane Doe, a young woman found skeletonized in a grave. The young woman’s death does not have many of the other characteristics of Gott’s killing, but the three markings might suggest a link. A third murder that occurs around the same time of Gott’s death also seems to be a possible link, but the connections are so diffuse at first that Detective Jane is skeptical, leaving Detective Jane and M.E. Maura at odds with each other. Adding to the brutality of the storyline (if there can be more death, since counting Millie’s expedition there are at least ten different named characters who are probably the victim of homicide), a zookeeper is killed by a leopard. The manner of her death and the way in which the wild cat attempts to quarantine and to protect the vanquished seems to suggest that the murderer is in some ways acting just like a leopard. Of course, the brilliance of the mystery is that Gerritsen knows the reader is trying to construct links not only between the murders and deaths in the present-day but also between these murders and deaths with Millie’s experiences in South Africa. Eventually Gerritsen patiently threads both storylines together. As with most mysteries, some suspension of disbelief is required. After all, a serial killer with a penchant for killing like a leopard who takes the time to truss up victims, eviscerate them, while making sure to mark their bones in a specific way, may sound too farfetched (thankfully) for some, but Gerritsen is always all-in for these murder mysteries, so sit back and enjoy the homicidal ride. I can say without worry about spoilers that one expects Jane Rizzoli and ME Maura Isles to be back for another installment sometime next year. Gerritsen does remind us that Rizzoli and Isles do have personal and professional lives beyond their crime-solving. Maura is considering leaving for California and also continues to deal with a manipulative, homicidal mother who is apparently dying of pancreatic cancer and is still incarcerated. At the same time, Jane is still attempting to navigate the dark waters of her parents’ possible divorce. One thinks that Gerritsen is already laying the groundwork for future mysteries in one form or another, and we’ll be excited to see (and to read) these newest installments.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.randomhouse.com/book/224945/die-again-a-rizzoli-isles-novel-by-tess-gerritsen

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Published on February 27, 2015 22:45

February 1, 2015

Asian American Literature – Megareview for February 1, 2015

I haven’t had as much time to read and to review as usual, so you will get a couple of lightning-form reviews here (not my preference, but better to get the brief word of out on books rather than not discuss them at all)!

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

In this post, reviews of Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart (University of Washington Press, 2014), John Okada’s No-No Boy (University of Washington Press, 2014), Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660 (University of Washington Press, 2014); Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter (University of Washington Press, 2014); Kimiko Hahn’s Brain Fever (W.W. Norton, 2014); Hoa Nguyen’s Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 (Wave Books, 2014); Yang Huang’s Living Treasures (Harvard Square Editions, 2014); Maija Rhee Devine’s The Voices of Heaven (Seoul Selection, 2013).

A Review of Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart (University of Washington Press, 2014), John Okada’s No-No Boy (University of Washington Press, 2014), Miné
Okubo’s Citizen 13660 (University of Washington Press, 2014); Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter (University of Washington Press, 2014).

Rather than focus on the content of classics like Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart, John Okada’s No-No Boy, Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660, and Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter, I’m actually going to be discussing the series of reprints (in their material and newly minted forms) that the University of Washington Press has been putting out based upon many of its canonical Asian American literary works, otherwise known as the “Classics of Asian American literature Series.”

These reprints are being rolled out over the next couple of years, and these first four have been given the reprint treatment (two more are on the way and I will be reviewing them at a later point). The impetus for these reprints seems to be primarily aimed at giving these books a larger cohesion as a collected set. Each title in the series comes with a cover and color blocking that comes to match the others in some form; all the reprints so far also include a cover image that are art/ photography pieces in one form of another. The cover to No-No Boy, for instance, includes an image of a large face that was drawn by Jillian Tamaki; Citizen 13660 includes an image from the graphic narrative itself; and America is in the Heart includes an image from a mural painted by a group of artists. Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter includes a cover photo by Thomas W. Parker, who was part of the WRA’s head of the photographic section and thus an important figure in the documentation related to the Japanese American internment. Each book is obviously a touchstone for Asian American literature, so the reprints also all come with new sections. For instance, Ruth Ozeki pens a letter to John Okada at the opening to the No-No Boy reprint, revealing a Japanese American intergenerational link that is both poignant and vital to understanding the impact of the novel through ethnic identifications. Christine Hong provides a luminous introduction to Okubo’s Citizen 13660 that contextualizes its complicated publication history and reception. In a similar manner, Marilyn C. Alquizola and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi explore the continued impact that America is in the Heart has had on Asian American studies (and race and ethnic studies) and further offer a useful exegesis of the critical terrain concerning this key cultural production. Marie Rose Wong provides a pithy new introduction to Sone’s Nisei Daughter and much like Alquizola and Hirabayashi provide a sense of the historical reception of the work.

I found the introduction offered by Ozeki to be the most compelling only insofar as it provided a direct indication of Asian American literature as a kind of genealogy in which one generation of writers influences the next. There has been a tendency (at least from my experience) to consider Asian American literature as a “unfounded” tradition, one that does not have a discrete historical legacy that appears to accrue genealogical meaning over time, but this assumption is especially wrongheaded in this contemporary moment in which the very terminology of Asian American literature has been in use almost for half a century at this point. The one snag for academics who regularly teach these books (like myself) is that these editions do not necessarily have the same pagination as the previous editions.

(first image in second row is the reprint cover here)

I checked the No-No Boy copy against my older version and the pagination is definitely different; I didn’t have the earlier editions of the other titles, but my educated guess is that they will not have maintained the same pagination, rendering earlier copies a potential problem for classroom use. But, these reprints give you an excuse to re-read these works and discover your love for them anew, granting you a refreshing opportunity to re-annotate these handsome new editions, using your trusty pen and pencil or post-it notes.

For the books in the classics series:

http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/books/series/CAAL.html

A Lightning Review of Kimiko Hahn’s Brain Fever (W.W. Norton, 2014).

I was pleased to see the note that concluded Kimiko Hahn’s Brain Fever, which explains in part what I had been experiencing throughout the reading of the collection. Though certainly unmoored and disoriented as I moved from one poem to the next, there still was a sense of unity that appeared as a kind of thread. For Hahn, the motif of the brain and all of its connotations offers one entry point into a collection that is essentially a long lyric “game” of word associations. The collection is far from gibberish to be sure, but the structure is based so much upon the ways that words associate with each other that you can’t help but drift unexpectedly along with these sometimes diffuse linkages. So, you’ll get scientific discourses, mixed in with lyrics concerning family and loved ones, strange dreams, and other feverish contexts. Here’s an excellent representative poem:

“Porch Light”

Barley. Poppy. Then pomegranate.
Now front porch light.

There’s no longer sensation without the one

once cradled in tissue, swaddled in blood—
feeling her hiccup inside the inside.

Turn the pages of a calendar
to retrieve one’s daughter

from his underground vow.

I must unlock the door, leave it ajar,
since by degrees

the son-in-law rations my weather (13).

I picked this poem in part because of its alliterative properties and the fact that it will connect quite well with the other lightning form review poem that is posted below. Why shouldn’t we have poppies, pomegranates and porch lights all come together? But, beyond these rather strange sequencings of lyrics: a calendar from whence springs a daughter and a son-in-law who apparently apportions the “weather,” we can’t help but get a sense of something mythic going on here as soon as the pomegranate imagery appears. Hahn begins her potpourri of associations, as the sense of familial rupture is placed alongside the Greek myth of Persephone who could of course only spend half the year with her beloved mother Demeter. The reference to the “hiccup inside the inside” denoting the once embryonic state of her child, who once moved inside her mother’s body. References to barley make more sense in this instance, as Demeter, the harvest goddess, would be associated with such a grain. Perhaps, this poem then functions to consider the “empty nest” syndrome that might come with a daughter leaving home to be with her husband, only to return during certain months of the year. But, this one poem is of course part of the largely, sometimes disconnected, but also innovative collection, in which the lyric speaker finds herself juxtaposing various discourses together: the personal, the scientific, the unexpected all in furious bloom. Expect to be filled with lyric euphoria, a heady feeling that comes with Hahn’s scorching Brain Fever.

Buy the Book Here:

http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Brain-Fever/

A Lightning Review of Hoa Nguyen’s Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 (Wave Books, 2014).

I’ve always been a huge fan of Hoa Nguyen’s poetry. I earlier reviewed her collection Hecate Lochia for Gently Read Literature. In Nguyen’s latest (after As Long as Trees Last) is a collection of all of Nguyen’s earlier publications (including the hard to find chapbook Red Juice as well as the full collections of Your Ancient See Through and the aforementioned Hecate Lochia). The real gem is of course in reprinting these works because they so soon go out of print. I finished this compendium not long after Kimiko Hahn’s Brain Fever. Both collections are great to read together because there is so much wordplay going on. Nguyen especially revels in the lyric poetry with a staccato-cadence. One of my favorites is “Poppies”:

Poppies for sleep                     Poppies for your highway
at Ben Lomon or Los Gatos                Poppies for your
Charles Baudelaire eyedrops                 Poppies
to please my red field of vision            Poppies
for a lemon cake                      Poppies smack you on
the head                                   Poppies that are closed and
poppies that are open Plastic poppies discontinued
at Hobby Lobby                                  Poppies in a glass jar
on your bed-stand                    Remember-the-dead poppies (23).

I unfortunately cannot reproduce the exact formatting that Nguyen employs for this delightfully and sonically innovative poem. We can see the “pop” in poppies sparking of the page, as the reader jumps from one phrase to the next. The interesting use of enjambment and formatting all contributes to this readerly “popping” from one line to the next. But this kind of poem is more largely illustrative of Nguyen’s willingness to use sound packets (phonetics), enjambment and formatting all to enhance a given context. In this case, the blooming of the poppies in all of their strange and wonderful morphologies continues to crop up in unexpected places. The collected poems in Red Juice are of course full of these lyrical surprises, entertaining twists of sonic, structural, and signifying turns and we’ll eagerly await what Nguyen will have in store for us in the future.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.wavepoetry.com/products/red-juice-poems-1998-2008

A Review of Yang Huang’s Living Treasures (Harvard Square Editions, 2014).

Yang Huang’s debut novel Living Treasures appears out of yet another small press I only recently got wind of: Harvard Square Editions. More about the press can be found here:

http://harvardsquareeditions.org/about/

It’s general formation brings about the intriguing way that publishers can be created simply out of the richness of social networking produced through education. Further still, the entity seems to be independent of university press publishing, which allows this kind of press to focus more specifically on literature (rather than say academic studies). In any case, Yang Huang can be grouped with the Asian American writers who have emerged in the post-Tiananmen period (along with the likes of Yiyun Li, Ha Jin, Qiu Xiaolong, Diane Wei Liang, and others). Her novel, Living Treasures, is a kind of bildungsroman for its heroine, Gu Bao, who is in college during the height of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. She’s not really interested in the protests and is far more concerned with her ongoing romance with a handsome soldier named Tong, who is slightly older than her (she’s eighteen). She has shielded her educated parents from her romance because she knows they would disapprove of her choice to date a man in the military. She herself is a law student with ambitious plans for a career in the profession, a trajectory that is imperiled when she finds herself pregnant with Tong’s child. Her parents immediately encourage her to get an abortion, one provided by a country doctor who lives in the vicinity of her beloved grandparents. Tong is driven out of Gu Bao’s life after realizing that Gu Bao does not want to give up her dreams of a professional future and would rather abort the baby to pursue rather than marry Tong. In the wake of their break up, Gu Bao travels with her mother to the countryside for the abortion, receives it, and then recuperates there with the help of her grandparents. Gu Bao is of course conflicted about the abortion, and much of her initial time in the recovery period is spent grieving over her unborn child (who she had named Soybean). A chance encounter with a pregnant woman on a rocky hillside allows her to make an unexpected friend, but one who has a secret. Indeed, this woman, Orchid, is pregnant with her second child, thus she is in hiding due to China’s one-child policy. She lives alongside her husband and daughter in a makeshift home created from a cave located in the hillside and will eventually go into seclusion with a midwife once she must deliver. Gu Bao’s friendship with Orchid is important, as it provides her the opportunity to be near to a mother figure, and she begins to dream of the possibility that she can have a second chance at romance. The concluding arc shifts the plot into high gear, as Gu Bao sends a letter to Tong, hoping for a rapprochement. When Tong is willing to visit her, Gu Bao requests that he stay with Orchid and her family, knowing full well that Tong would have to keep their location and situation a secret from authorities. As you can imagine, things start to go wrong, and Gu Bao (along with the help of Tong) must find a way to make things right. Readers will be pleasantly surprised, I think, by the adventurous conclusion, which seems more along the lines of an action plot. Of course, Huang’s novel benefits from the tremendous inclusion of social, political, and historical textures. Though Gu Bao is never a student revolutionary, she is well aware of the gravity of the events, as one of her closest classmates suffers from the tragic and violent loss of a loved one associated with the Tiananmen protests. Further still, the novel’s exploration of the one-child policy signals the problematic issues related to the Chinese woman’s body, especially in the modernizing country. Gu Bao’s own predicament over her abortion gestures to the apparent impossibility of being a single mother and a career woman, while Orchid’s seclusion and continued paranoia over her situation register the stark reality of the political harnessing of biopower. The novel offers an incisive fictional account of the perils of Chinese motherhood in all of its contemporary manifestations.

More on the Book Here:

http://harvardsquareeditions.org/portfolio-items/3923/

A Review of Maija Rhee Devine’s The Voices of Heaven (Seoul Selection, 2013).

Maija Rhee Devine’s The Voices of Heaven (Seoul Selection, 2013) comes out of yet another press that I hadn’t heard of yet and shows how wide and deep the rabbit hole of Asian American literature continues to be. For more on Seoul Selection, go here:

http://www.seoulselection.com/usa/product.php?id_product=150

For more on the author:

http://www.maijarheedevine.com/

The Voices of Heaven immediately intrigued me because it deals primarily with a fictional account of the Korean War. I occasionally have discussed this issue because both of my parents endured that period of time, with my mother and her family in particular being displaced: they were forced to flee southward when their home in Seoul was bombed. Devine’s novel begins just prior to the start of the war, with narrative perspective vacillating among four different characters: Gui-yong, a middle-aged Korean American man without a male heir; Eum-chun, Gui-yong’s wife; Soo-Yang, the soon-to-be mistress of Gui-yong who is given a spot in the home in the hopes that she will bear Gui-yong an heir; and Mi-Na, Gui-yong and Eum-chun’s adoptive daughter. What was immediately interesting to me about the story was the exploration of a concubinage system that I didn’t understand still took place in that period. The entire family structure, of course, deviates from American heteronuclear family ideals. Even Mi-Na’s adoption is a little bit out of place and culturally complicated for Korea at that time, especially as evidenced by Mi-Na’s treatment from the few who know of her origins. Indeed, both Gui-yong and Eum-chun worry that Mi-Na’s ancestry will be unmasked and no one will be want to marry her because she does not have definable progenitors. When the war finally does occur, the family disintegrates, with Gui-yong being separated both from his wife and mistress. Eum-chun ends up on her own for a long time caring for the daughter (Li-Ho) of her sister and Mi-Na, while Soo-yang eventually does bear a son (and many more children). Amongst the constant bombing and threat of death, the narrative of the family’s reunification drives the plot forward. Will all the characters survive and find their ways back to each other? Eventually they do, and Devine’s biggest contribution is continuing to contour how we understand the Korean war through the terrain of cultural production, a project that has been taken up in some part by writers such as Richard E. Kim (The Martyred), Susan Choi (The Foreign Student), Chang-rae Lee (The Surrendered), Suji Kwock Kim (Notes from a Divided Country), Myung Mi Kim (Under Flag), and Sunny Che (Forever Alien). Devine’s novel unfortunately suffers from a hasty wrap-up, as the pacing suddenly fast forwards, and we see many, many years of Mi-Na’s life pass by. In this section, we begin to see more of the feminist impulse appear with respect to the changing attitudes related to women and education. Mi-Na well understands that her educational opportunities are unlike those offered to her mothers, and we begin to see how her emergence as an academic star is of course a way for her to escape the paternalistic system of marriage and concubinage that had structured her own family. This change in character development becomes jarring, and by the time the reader reaches the poignant ending, there is some frustration because it’s clear that Devine probably had at least one other novel’s length of a book to write, especially involving Mi-Na’s eventual arrival in the United States. The conclusion sees Mi-Na returning to Korea, where she is given a key piece of information that the readers had known all along. This moment also seems to suggest yet more possible places for a novel to go, but by then, Devine’s novel is over. Though I wasn’t a fan of the novel’s concluding pace, the political and sociohistorical import of Devine’s novel cannot be denied, as it presents us with an invaluable fictional account of the Korean War in all of its violent and brutal morphologies.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.seoulselection.com/usa/product.php?id_product=150

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Published on February 01, 2015 22:02

January 7, 2015

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for January 7, 2015

In this post, reviews of: Jay Antani’s The Leaving of Things (Lake Union Publishing, 2014); Vivek Shraya’s God Loves Hair (illustrated by Juliana Neufeld) (Arsenal Pulp Reprint Edition, 2014) and She of the Mountains (illustrated by Raymond Biesinger (Arsenal Pulp, 2014); Mei Mei Evans’s Oil and Water (University of Alaska Press, 2013); Andrew Koh’s The Glass Cathedral (Epigram Books, 2011); The Last Lesson of Mrs. de Souza (Epigram Books, 2013); Ausma Zehanat Khan’s The Unquiet Dead (Minotaur Books, 2015)

A Review of Jay Antani’s The Leaving of Things (Lake Union Publishing, 2014).

Jay Antani’s debut print novel The Leaving of Things (after the graphic novel he scripted entitled the Mysterians Vol. 1) is told from the perspective of Vikram, who at the start of the novel is leaving Wisconsin because his father has gotten a permanent job in India. Vikram is about college age and his plans to stay in Wisconsin and explore life with his girlfriend Shannon (as well as his best friends Karl and Nate) are obviously dashed. His parents are spurred to leave the United States, especially as Vikram is almost arrested for having been caught with a controlled substance (pot). He leaves the police department without having been officially charged and this moment is a wake up call for his parents, pushing them to go back to their homeland. Vikram, as well as his younger brother, Anand, are not particularly excited about these transnational prospects. Vikram spends the first half of the novel basically sulking, hoping to get letters from Shannon, while reluctantly transitioning to a college once attended by his father. Shannon eventually breaks up with him through a letter, while Vikram gradually begins to acclimate to India and even finds many things to like about his new home. A trip to the Taj Majal, for instance, grants him a unique appreciation for his ethnic background. He initiates a flirtation with a fellow student named Priya, who he later discovers is to be betrothed to a man arranged by her parents. Through all of Vikram’s various growing pains—and let’s be clear, the novel is a bildungsroman more than anything else—he maintains a steadfast connection with the United States; he eventually grows convinced he should apply to the University of Wisconsin. He does receive admittance, but by that point in the novel, he has made more friends at the college, has found renewed interest in his love for photography, and even has repaired his relationship with his parents. Should be actually go back to the United States? Whereas the Vikram at the start of the novel would have been absolutely incensed by any hesitation on the part of this India-adjusted Vikram, Antani’s point seems to be that Vikram must be able to see exactly where his parents have come from and in so doing get a better sense of their sacrifices and their cultural attachments, which in turn help him to understand how he can better relate to them. Further still, in the process of this “leaving of things,” he comes to understand the plasticity in his own concept of identity and homeland. Some late stage complications do arise concerning Vikram’s visa and whether or not he will be able to finance an education in the United States, but Antani seems determined to give the novel a firm resolution. Readers may at first balk over Vikram’s teen angst, especially as it casts an ominous cloud over the first half of the novel, but patient readers will appreciate Antani’s character development by the conclusion.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-leaving-of-things-jay-antani/1116813386?ean=9781477826133

A Review of Vivek Shraya’s God Loves Hair (illustrated by Juliana Neufeld) (Arsenal Pulp Reprint Edition, 2014) and She of the Mountains (illustrated by Raymond Biesinger (Arsenal Pulp, 2014).

Something’s up in those Northern Waters! Canada has long been at the forefront of queer Asian North American cultural productions (see the work of Shani Mootoo, Shyam Selvadurai, Larissa Lai, and Lydia Kwa for some obvious and wonderful examples). Vivek Shraya adds to this growing archive of writings produced by writers north of the border with two wonderful cultural productions: God Loves Hair (in a reprint edition as it was originally published in 2011 and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, which also comes with a cool blurb by Sara Quin for you big Tegan & Sara fans like myself) and She of the Mountains. Shraya has quite the interesting biography and readers of AALF should be aware that he boasts an impressive musical catalogue. For more on Shraya, go here:

http://vivekshraya.com/

For one of his songs (with Sara Quin featured no less):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRh5ooIcFnQ

God Loves Hair is billed as a young adult fiction, which is an interesting genre label considering that the work makes such generous use of page space, large lettering, and illustrations. Upon first impression, I thought I was reading something geared toward elementary school students and the opening stories did focus on a protagonist who was aged very young, but as the stories move forward, it’s clear that there’s something of a bildungsroman going on. The protagonist moves from childhood to his teenage years and learns to confront his budding sexualities and genders. God Loves Hair begins with the title story in which a Sri Lankan mother vows that if her first two children are sons, she will sacrifice their hair to God. The vow seems to have worked because her first two children are born sons, and she ends up keeping her promise by traveling back to her homeland to cut off the hair of her sons. Other stories involve the difficult adjustment periods that the protagonist faces during schooling: he’s not normatively masculine enough or white enough to fit in with the general crowd, so he’s singled out quite early on for being “gay.” While the protagonist does admit to some same-sex desires, it’s never quite cut and dry where this protagonist stands concerning his sexuality. Further still, his genderqueerness emerges occasionally with respect his periodic interest in feminine cultures. When God Loves Hair ends, the protagonist sees the image of two Hindu mythical figures joined together such that one half of the body seems male and the other female. This moment is the one that allows him to see that there is a place for him somewhere, that the two halves of his desiring selves might find a place in one body. Juliana Neufeld’s lush color illustrations provide a useful visual analogue that gives his tale far more accessibility to different age groups than suggested by the “young adult fiction” label. Though the general themes are represented in complex ways, the general story—a Sri Lankan coming of age in Canada—should appeal to many audiences.

She of the Mountains is Shraya’s adult debut, though he takes a similar path by again using an illustrator, but there is a bit of a difference with the visuals. Raymond Biesinger’s visuals are far more abstract, perhaps even geometrical in style, as he makes use of a two-tone/ three-tone color system in which hues of green and black most often take center stage (and mirror the colors found on the cover). The visuals are exceedingly appropriate given the more poetic and impressionistic quality of the novel, which is splint to two rough storylines. One is mostly rendered from the first person perspective of Parvati, who is married to Shiv (or Shiva). This story is Shraya’s reconfiguration of the relationship between these Hindu deities. In this version, they have a son together named Ganesha, but Shiv accidentally lops off Ganesha’s head. In order to rectify things, Shiv is able to procure another head for the infant, but it comes in the form of an elephant. Parvati still manages to find a way to love her strange, “queer” son, even while that son begins to realize he is a little bit different, not exactly like his younger sibling, who seems to be the apple of his father’s eye. The second storyline (told in the third person) seems far more autobiographical and seems to riff of the early sections of God Love Hair in its evocation of the cruelness of school cultures. As the protagonist is pegged as gay, he begins to wonder whether or not he actually is gay. This soul-searching/ desire-searching is the general theme grounding the novel, as the protagonist’s confusion is especially made palpable after a same-sex encounter leaves him rather nonplussed. It becomes clear that the protagonist finds much emotional fulfillment with women, and he begins a lengthy romantic relationship with a close female friend, even though he very much cannot identify as heterosexual or gender normative. He seems to lack a conceptual vocabulary to understand his various sexual and gender fluidities. The word “queer” finally offers him enough wiggle room to encapsulate his complicated desires, but Shraya’s work goes far beyond the exigencies that arise over sexuality and gender. Indeed, Shraya’s novel paints a delicate picture of an individual who is also struggling with the fact of racial and ethnic difference, something repeatedly invocated by the split between the protagonist’s mind and body. There are points where he cannot seem to understand the connection between the way he feels and the estrangement from the brown-ness of his physical exterior. His romantic relationship provides him a measure of comfort and security, but he cannot find a way to unify his body and mind in a constitutive manner. The struggle for self-acceptance is at the core of Shraya’s work and marks the protagonist as a deeply introspective, tortured figure with whom so many readers can identify. Shraya’s poetic and elegant writing can sometimes verge on being too abrupt (indeed, there were points where I had to re-read a section because a major plot point had occurred in the “break” between two blocks) and the one drawback of this stylistic is that we want to dwell a little bit longer in the effervescent fictional world Shraya has so lyrically and elegantly crafted.

Buy the Books Here:

http://www.arsenalpulp.com/bookinfo.php?index=399

http://www.arsenalpulp.com/bookinfo.php?index=406

A Review of Mei Mei Evans’s Oil and Water (University of Alaska Press, 2013).

Mei Mei Evans’s Oil and Water (University of Alaska Press, 2013) is perhaps the first book I have read by an American writer of Asian descent that is set in Alaska. It tells a sort of fictionalized account of the Exxon Valdez disaster, changing the basic circumstances but remaining true to the incredible devastation wrought by the oil spill. Evans toggles the third person perspective among a number of different characters including a harried fisherman named Gregg (a vet), his deckhand Lee (who is a Korean adoptee and a lesbian), Lee’s friends Daniel (also a vet and a widower) and Tessa, who is married to Daniel. The novel essentially begins with the spill overtaking Gregg’s boat; Gregg and Lee are mired in the muck but are eventually able to make landfall. As information slowly starts to trickle out, they realize the gravity and extent of the spill, which is of course an environmental catastrophe. As the company that owns the supertanker goes into damage control, the residents of one local Alaska town called Selby rally together in order to address the oil spill. It is quite evident that the economic and financial support offered by the big oil companies has been welcomed in relation to pipelines and drilling, but in the wake of the disaster, there is obvious rage over the lack of preparedness concerning the possibility of a major oil spill. Debates begin to rage about the ethics around the oil company’s business practices and the manner by which the company uses the spill as a way to manage the local residents (and to pay them off, something that Lee considers to be blood money). Once the oil spill becomes a national issue, the spotlight brings in out-of-towners, many of whom are simply looking to make a quick buck off of the money rich oil companies. Evans obviously knows her historical and contextual details, and the novel is layered with considerable depth, ranging from the effects of the oil spill on otters and sea bird populations. More ominous are the issues related to the health of those who inhaled the hydrocarbons from the spill. The novel certainly possesses a political sophistication that should make this work of special interest to ecocritics and regionalist scholars. There is a naturalistic tone to this work, which is not surprising given the rugged but austere nature of the land. Evans’s poetic writing emerges in some sublime passages that invoke both the apocalyptic effects of the oil spill as well as the inherent beauty of the Alaskan coastal communities. Despite the fierce cold, the inclement and often dangerous weather patterns, one can understand why characters like Lee are so drawn to the hardscrabble, frontier life. Evans is also careful to consider the racial elements of the story, especially as many characters are of indigenous or minority backgrounds and their livelihoods exist in obvious distinction from the white elites who populate the oil company’s crisis management teams. The momentum of the story itself flags at times, but this uneven development is certainly due to the fact that the major antagonist is an oil spill, and so Evans must wrangle with an environmentally anthropomorphized villain to generate plotting tension.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.alaska.edu/uapress/browse/detail/index.xml?id=479

A Review of Andrew Koh’s The Glass Cathedral (Epigram Books, 2011)

Andrew Koh’s The Glass Cathedral was originally published in the mid-90s, but Epigram Books has put out a series of “Singapore Classics,” which includes this particular title, which I’ve known about for awhile, but could never get my hands on. That is, until now! In Koh’s work, love blooms in an English class. It could have been just like any other love story, except we’re in Singapore, where homosexuality is outlawed and our protagonist, Colin, is a devout Catholic, while his potential partner, James, is certainly not the church-going kind. Though there are some cringe-inducing moments, some of which is certainly attributable to Colin’s naïveté, the novel bravely delves into an issue that has long been a thorny one for the modernizing city-state. As Colin comes to terms with his feelings, he begins to question his religious beliefs, bringing his concerns to other members of the church. Eventually, he confides in Father Norbert, who has been a close advisor to him, only to discover that Father Norbert has been harboring some queer feelings himself. Of course, no romance would be complete without a love triangle, and Father Norbert additionally makes clear that he has feelings for Colin. Father Norbert, being the devout man of faith that he is, takes his issues to a church elder who suggests he travel on a spiritual retreat to Thailand. Meanwhile, Colin’s relationship with James is heating up, which presents a problem because both men are reaching marriageable age and family members (and others) are on their cases concerning the appropriate female partners. Thus, Colin and James must conduct their relationship in secret, something that requires James to make up a girlfriend named Rose. Eventually, though, the secrecy takes its toll: Colin and James must make a pivotal decision concerning whether or not they can take their relationship to the next level. Given the time and context of Koh’s work, the novel is certainly groundbreaking for its themes and willingness to take on such a controversial topic. Though almost two decades have passed since the novel was published, not much has essentially changed concerning the legal rights for queer men in Singapore (from what I understand). Thus, the impact and importance of this work perhaps remains as vital as when it first emerged and Epigram’s choice to include it as part of the classics series certainly calls attention to their commitment to political progressivism and social equality.

Buy the Book Here:

http://shop.epigrambooks.sg/products/glass-cathedral

A Review of Cyril Wong’s The Last Lesson of Mrs. de Souza (Epigram Books, 2013).

I’m continuing to work through some of the catalogue over at Epigram Books, a Singapore based publisher. I also continue to be amazed at the depth of the archive concerning Asian Anglophone fictions. I’ve slowly been tracking publishing houses in Canada, India, Hong Kong, Australia, the Philippines, Singapore, and other locations and have come to realize how limited the U.S. based archive is especially in terms of general access. In any case, Cyril Wong is one writer whose U.S. presence remains problematically low, especially given his numerous publications. The Last Lesson of Mrs. de Souza is his first novel (after a number of poetry collections and a short story collection). The story is told in the first person from the perspective of the titular Mrs. de Souza; she is just about set to retire and is having her last day in the classroom. Her husband Christopher has recently passed away; both she and her husband are of Eurasian backgrounds (the name de Souza a nod to a Portuguese heritage). Much of the story is told in flashback mode and Mrs. de Souza uses her “last lesson” to reflect upon a painful experience she had while advising a young student named Amir. Amir had come to the narrator in order to express the fact that he believed he was gay, and he wanted to share that knowledge with someone else, perhaps get some advice about what to do with the information. Mrs. de Souza does not know how to deal with this admission and struggles to counsel the boy properly. Wong seems to be intent on exploring the limits of the instructor’s position, someone who often times has to consider the appropriateness revolving around how to counsel a student beyond the bounds of the classroom. Though Amir seems perfectly satisfied having shared the conflicts concerning his sexuality, Mrs. de Souza is not content with leaving it at a conversation and takes it upon herself to contact Amir’s father. That conversation, which occurs over the phone, is brief and Amir’s father ends up hanging up on her. Mrs. de Souza’s intervention seems to have gone badly, and in the following days Amir is nowhere to be seen and is not in class. She later learns the devastating news that he is dead, apparently having committed suicide. The novel uses this episode as the structure and the grounds for Mrs. de Souza’s desire to remember the past and to find a way to make meaning out of her career. The conclusion is sobering and unsentimental, certainly to strike polarized reactions in the reader. I couldn’t help but feel an Ishiguro-vibe throughout, especially as Mrs. de Souza is made out to be an untrustworthy narrator; her memories are often hazy, time periods sometimes meld together (confusing the reader to be sure), and Mrs. de Souza apparently occasionally has visions of her dead husband. Wong’s work seems more philosophical in nature, related to the impact we make in our occupations, regardless of type or stripe. Do we leave some sort of positive legacy in the world; can we be defined by one event as a way to understand what we have done, what we have accomplished? These questions are hardly answered by the conclusion, but the existential issues are of course the whole point. A solid novelistic debut from Wong.

Buy the Book Here:

http://shop.epigrambooks.sg/collections/fiction/products/the-last-lesson-of-mrs-de-souza

A Review of Ausma Zehanat Khan’s The Unquiet Dead (Minotaur Books, 2015)

If Ausma Zehanat Khan’s The Unquiet Dead is any indication of the kind of year it will be for fans of Asian American literature in 2015 (and literatures in general penned in English by writers of Asian descent), then we should rejoice. I was able to pry the novel away from my hands one night, but finished it in the next, while looking at the clock continuously in hopes that I would not be sleeping too much past my bedtime and ruin my schedule the next day. The Unquiet Dead is a deeply disturbing and depressing but no less brilliant debut novel that uses the best in form and social contexts to get at the thorny issue of war crimes and justice. The novel is told from a third person perspective, with focalization primarily shifting between two main characters, Esa Khattak and Rachel Getty. Esa Khattak, a Pakistani Muslim, a detective with a particular Canadian crime division related to sensitive issues often involving ethnic minorities, is asked by a close friend (Tom) to research the suspicious death of a man by the name of Christopher Drayton. Esa, realizing the gravity of the case immediately, asks that his partner, Rachel Getty, be assigned to the investigation as well. Rachel, as Esa knows, is level-headed and will not let her feelings get in the way of the case, while Esa understands that given his personal history, he may find the investigation difficult to navigate on his own. Khan leaves readers in the dark early on. Like Rachel, the readers know far less than Esa does, but eventually it becomes clear that Christopher Drayton may be the assumed identity of a man who may have perpetrated the massacre at Srebenica. Here, Khan uses an actual historical event to ground the detective plot, though Drayton is of course her fictive construct. The cast of supporting characters is large and therefore offers Esa and Rachel a number of possible suspects, including those (such as Mink Norman and David Newhall) connected to a museum that Christopher Drayton had planned to donate money to and his soon-to-be wedded wife Melanie Blessant, who is a divorcee with two teenaged daughters (named Hadley and Cassidy). Others such as Nate Clare, once a very close friend of Khattak but obviously estranged from him, and the Imam at a local mosque complicate the plot even further. Rachel receives her own mystery subplot related to the disappearance of her younger brother, Zach, who has not been seen for seven years. His leavetaking is associated with a highly dysfunctional family life involving a sour mother and an alcoholic father. Khan does not leave this subplot fully explored (though there is a reunion of sorts), obviously leaving things open for future investigative installments involving Khattak and Getty.

Khan’s choice to use the Srebenica massacre is a dicey one for many reasons: it requires considerable research and immediately introduces this novel to a host of possible critiques concerning the nature of entertainment as it relates to war crimes. But, readers are in the right hands here: Khan is able to deftly weave in historical elements with the kind of depth required of such a task (it is clear that considerable research and care went into the details included), while at the same time never letting the reader get settled into an entertaining, by the numbers mystery plot. The conclusion is certainly more noir-ish than anything else: Khan’s narrative seems to direct us to wonder about the possibility of justice at all and that one death and the circumstances around it, however mysterious and however homicidal in question, may simply pale in comparison to other crimes it might be connected with it. And perhaps, even more darkly, Khan’s narrative makes you wonder whether or not you want a crime to be solved precisely because your empathy for the victim in question is continually eroded as the plot moves forward. Finally, this novel encouraged me to do some research on Srebenica itself, to consider the novel beyond its fictional world, and consider what was being depicted in the text. Perhaps, Khan’s novel is the only kind that could have been written about such an event precisely because we cannot have a fitting resolution based upon a period of time that involved so much slaughter. The novel seems to direct us to the final message that there can never be enough justice for the unquiet dead. Highly, highly recommended with a word of caution to those who are disturbed by graphic imagery and textually represented violence.

December 21, 2014

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for December 21, 2014

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for December 21, 2014

HAPPY HOLIDAYS! Spend some of your vacation time reading some—what else?—Asian American literature!

In this post, reviews of Cory Doctorow’s In Real Life (illustrated by Jen Wang) (First Second, 2014); E.C. Myers’s The Silence of Six (Adaptive Books, 2014); Ha Jin’s A Map of Betrayal (Pantheon, 2014); Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (W.W. Norton, 2014); Natasha Deen’s Guardian (Great Plains Teen Fiction, 2014); Oh Yong Hwee (writer) and Koh Hong Teng’s (illustrator) Ten Sticks and One Rice (Epigram Books, 2010); Vikram Paralkar’s The Afflictions (with illustrations by Amanda Thomas) (Lanternfish Press, LLC); Maria Chaudhuri’s Beloved Strangers (Bloomsbury, 2014).

Sorry for my long stay away from AALF, I’ve been busy moving and trying to get my new digs in order, while also somehow making time for the holidays and new teaching responsibilities! I haven’t had as much time to read and to review as usual, so you will get a couple of lightning-form reviews here (not my preference, but better to get the brief word of out on books rather than not discuss them at all)! I’m also apparently still in academia.

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

A Review of Cory Doctorow’s In Real Life (illustrated by Jen Wang) (First Second, 2014).

Jen Wang illustrates on In Real Life, which is penned by Cory Doctorow, a noted science fiction writer. Though Wang’s duties are limited here to the visuals, the work is no doubt relevant to those interested in transnational Asian/ American studies, as the narrative involves a young high school girl named Anda who goes into the land of the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role play game) and strikes a friendship with a Chinese player, one who is working for a company that farms virtual gold and later sells it in “real” life. The plot line is inspired by a rather interesting introduction penned by Cory Doctorow in which he explores the unity of games and economics and reminds us that, in many ways, our lives are revolving around forms of game play. Jobs are in some sense perhaps simply more sophisticated forms of games, where we must work with other “players” in order to achieve some sort of goal. You might have limited resources, but the outcome is ultimately similar: to find out a way to get on top. The graphic narrative explores this concept through the ways that MMORPGs collide with the worlds external to them. In this case, Anda’s Chinese buddy is farming for gold that will then have an economic value in the “real” world. At the same time, Anda sees the MMORPG as a venue for correcting and intervening in issues related to social inequality. Anda, especially inspired by her father’s work, wants to advocate for this Chinese player, one who goes by the name Raymond (he’s particularly interested in increasing his English skills), and wants to help Raymond organize his fellow workers to agitate for more work-place rights. Doctorow is keen on marking the complexities of this kind of interaction, and it’s not surprising that things go from bad to worse when Raymond’s organizing causes job tension and results in being fired. Thus, Anda’s quest is not so easily completed. There’s also another plot concerning female gamers and Anda’s place in a guild, but I found that it came secondary to this issue of transnationalism and labor activism that crops up in an unexpected, but socially conscious way. Wang’s visuals show a signature style, and she doesn’t deviate too much from her panel use and sketch modes offered up in Koko Be Good, which is a very good thing. Another outstanding title out by Frist Second, which has generated an impressive catalog of works by Asian/ American graphic narrative writers and/or artists, including Derek Kirk Kim, Thien Pham, Lat and Gene Luen Yang.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/In-Real-Life-Cory-Doctorow/dp/1596436581

http://us.macmillan.com/inreallife/corydoctorow

A Review of E.C. Myers’s The Silence of Six (Adaptive Books, 2014).

So, if like me, you’ve been wondering what E.C. Myers’s latest offering will be (after Fair Coin and Quantum Coin), but now you can finally read it! The Silence of Six is a hacker-inspired thriller involving lots of secret passwords, social networking sites, executable files, and romps through Silicon Valley and Bay area locales. The opening of the novel is mysterious enough. A televised debate is occurring between presidential candidates at a Granville, California area high school. Max, our ostensible hero and protagonist, is watching when he receives an encrypted text from his buddy Evan. Max hadn’t been really thinking much about Evan lately, especially as he had become more popular in the wake of his successful courtship of Courtney, a high school reporter and once uber-desired cheerleader. Not soon after that text, the debate is interrupted by a mysterious masked figure appearing on all of the video screens. This mysterious figure is none other than Evan himself, but he gets offed by the conclusion of that video after having proclaimed something about “the silence of six.” What does the phrase mean and why are all the government officials involved with the debate suddenly demanding all phones, recording devices, and computers that were present during the event? Why are the governmental officials so adamant that they do not post updates on networking sites such as the ubiquitous Panjea (the obvious analogue to Facebook) concerning what happened? Such questions deeply trouble Max, who has grown up in a household in which distrust of the government is large and the desire to hack into any system looms as a major pastime. Though Max had moved away from his hacker background and had begun to assimilate into the “normal” high school activities, Evan’s death and the mystery behind the silence of six propel him into an unofficial investigation. Soon, he realizes that Evan may have stumbled on to something far more serious than some recreational hacking activity, something involving the most well-known hacking groups on the internet. The FBI, soon realizing that Max may be conducting his own investigation, grow suspicious and are soon on his trail. Max must go on the run, while trying to figure out more about Evan’s background as a hacker and how he is connected to the silence of six. His quest leads him to meet DoubleThink, an infamous online hacker, who turns out to be none other than another high school aged student, a teen by the name of Penny Polonsky (who has been further aided by her younger sister Risse). Though at first not sure of each other’s motives, the three end up becoming a firm alliance working toward unraveling Evan’s centrality in the silence of six. What we discover—and you should probably stop reading if you don’t want to be spoiled somewhat—is that the silence of six is a phrase meant to invoke the not-so-accidental deaths of six individuals with connections to hacking, but I’ll stop from revealing the final stages of the novel. Myers’s novel, besides its involving plot, is of course following alongside a long set of cultural productions querying the place of technology and information gathering. What is privacy in a period when anybody’s computer and phone can be hacked into? What value do we place upon the minutest details of our personal lives and how are we being manipulated in ways we might not even know? The recent semi-scandal involving Facebook’s commandeering of feeds in order to study users’ responses to more positive or more pessimistic stories is of course something that The Silence of Six directly critiques. As we hurtle toward ever more effective ways to gather data, novels such as this one remind us to slow down, consider the consequences, and at the same time, remember what it is that drove us to innovate in the first place. A definite recommended read for lovers of the paranormal young adult fiction and another inspired effort from Myers.

Buy the Book Here:

http://adaptivestudios.com/tag/silence-of-six/

A Review of Ha Jin’s A Map of Betrayal (Pantheon, 2014).

Well, I was very pleasantly surprised by Ha Jin’s latest effort, A Map of Betrayal, which comes on the tails of Nanjing Requiem. Ha Jin is of course the very prolific writer of numerous novels, short story collections, and poetry collections. A Map of Betrayal takes on a subject of great interest to Asian American literary critics: espionage (two works of critical relevance here are the outstanding monographs Leslie Bow’s Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion and Crystal Parikh’s An Ethics of Betrayal). It follows in the tradition of other works such as Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Susan Choi’s A Person of Interest, and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist in exploring the Asian American’s potentially divided national loyalties. The story is told for the most part in alternating first and third person narrative perspectives. Our first person perspective, which takes place in the present day, is given to Lilian Shang, the biracial daughter of the convicted spy Gary Shang and a stay-at-home, generally-disaffected housewife Nellie (nee McCarrick). Lillian is a history professor and wants to find out more about the life of her mysterious father. She, for instance, looks into the whereabouts of his first wife and in doing so discovers that the first wife may be still living in a section of northeast China. Lillian goes to China only to discover that Gary’s first wife has already died, though one of her children has survived (the other died as a young child during the famines that occurred throughout the Mao’s Great Leap Forward). She visits her half-sister and makes a strong bond with her adult nieces and later her nephew Ben, who is in some sort of strange occupation that requires him to travel all the time. The third person perspective follows Gary’s life trajectory, beginning with being recruited by the American government while also operating as an intelligence agent for China. As he goes further into his espionage duties, he must travel to various locations, including Okinawa, Hong Kong, and then later to the United States, all the while leaving behind a wife and two children. As his party affiliations grow deeper and he must maintain his cover, he assimilates into American life by marrying a second woman (Nelly) and having another child, Lillian. Throughout this period, he continues to gather intelligence for China, receiving promotions over time and garnering bonuses for the things he is able to reveal. The novel seems largely an allegory for the divided loyalties of any migrant subject, who must try to find a way to balance affiliations to multiple countries. Interestingly enough, and here I will be providing a major plot spoiler, we discover that Ben is also in the intelligence gathering business. But instead of taking the path that his father does—proclaiming that he served both countries, even when each end up ultimately renouncing him—Ben escapes with his loved one and attempts to evade the intelligence authorities. For Ben, then, his loyalty is to himself and his wife, rather than to any one country. The novel suggests the importance of individual ethics in a time saturated by nationalistic ideologies, but this retreat into the private sphere is still ever perilous. The conclusion indeed makes us wonder whether or not Ben has succeeded in his escape into a thirdspace: beyond migrant or citizen, spy or patriot. An intriguing and rousing effort from Jin, perhaps his strongest since the collection A Good Fall and a novel that will be certain to be adopted into course curricula and one that will become the subject of numerous critical articles.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.randomhouse.com/book/235408/a-map-of-betrayal-by-ha-jin

A Review of Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (W.W. Norton, 2014).

I’ll be honest: I really struggled throughout the reading of this novel. My admission isn’t to say that you would hate this book, but it will definitely be a challenge for those who perhaps aren’t as fond of “Dickensian-styled aesthetics.” By this phrase, I mean to say that there are a lot of characters in this novel, and the constant shifts in narrative perspective and time can serve to be a nuisance to a reader who might be more used a linear plot and a first person narrator. Neel Mukherjee’s follow-up to A Life Apart is an intergenerational saga focused on the Ghosh family. Fortunately, publishers saw fit to include a very useful family tree at the beginning of the novel, something I referred to again and again when I got confused about who was related to whom. Even in a Dickens novel, there is usually some sort of central storyline and protagonist, but the novel’s rhetoric is a bit unclear for a couple hundred pages, until we begin to see exactly why two different stories are being juxtaposed. First, there is a storyline concerning Supratik (told in the first person), the oldest son of the oldest son (Adinath, who has a number of siblings including Priyonath, Chhaya, Bholanath, and Somnath) of the family patriarch (Parfullanath, who is married to Charubala). Supratik has gone off with a Communist group (with ties to the Naxalites: reminding me issues brought up in Lahiri’s The Lowland and Chaudhuri’s Calcutta) to help out with farmers and sharecroppers, many of whom are being jilted by landowners due to loans they can never pay off. The other storyline follows the Ghosh family as a whole and by mean whole I mean that Mukherjee pretty much follows most of the major characters on the family tree at some point or another. For instance, we discover that Chhaya possesses an incredibly close relationship with her brother Priyo(nath) at a young age, but she later grows up to be a spinster. Priyo’s marriage to Purnima is under some strain, and he seeks the comforts of mistresses, especially those who can indulge in a particular scatological fetish, while his own daughter Baishakhi is coming-of-age and falling in love with a neighbor. The youngest sibling Somnath grows up to be something of a ruffian and his attitudes toward women end up costing him his life. Before he is killed (after attempting to assault a woman), he is married off to a woman named Purba, whose family is just overjoyed that she has managed to find a match with a man from a supposedly respectable background (they know nothing of his reputation). Purba’s son, Swarender, also happens to be a mathematics genius. Bholanath, one of the middle children, suffers the fate of many in this position, as he is often overlooked because he is rather average in all respects. The entire family is essentially supported by one business, the paper and printing company started by Parfullanath (who himself was divested of a potential inheritance in a jewelry store when his father unexpectedly dies). The family’s internal squabbles certainly give light to why Supratik might have left; indeed, Supratik’s lessons in Marxism convey that the family is often the structural unit that grounds oppressive hierarchies. We can see how the Ghosh family’s dysfunctional dynamics cannot ultimately mask the fact that they hail from the upper middle class, with all of the privileges that might come from that background. Thus, Supratik’s escape from the family is in some sense his desire to break free from what he sees to be a constraining and sometimes wasteful community structure. His believes that he best possible avenue for change is to address resource inequality, a mission that he cannot seem to initiate directly from within his own family. The Victorian-style aesthetic that Mukherjee emulates is perhaps the perfect vehicle to explore issues of class and narrative attention and resources; we see how each character does not get the same trajectory nor can expect to from the vantage point both of the third person narrator or based upon their contextual points of origin (an individual character’s gender, caste background, sexual background). The book seesaws in momentum, and readers must be able to balance their attention among a vast array of characters. Though readers will be tested, the persistent will be rewarded in the final arc, as storylines and threads converge, and we begin to see how the naturalistic drama that Mukherjee has set into motion will come to a devastating close.

Buy the Book Here:

http://books.wwnorton.com/books/The-Lives-of-Others/

A Review of Natasha Deen’s Guardian (Great Plains Teen Fiction, 2014).

Natasha Deen’s Guardian was one of the surprising YA fiction reads for me this year. Trolling the internets at night when I am having insomnia has become an incredibly productive way for me to come across books by Asian American and Asian Anglophone writers that I haven’t yet had a chance to read. Natasha Deen is also author to a number of other young adult and genre fictions, including the True Grime series. I have much to catch up on apparently. In Guardian (the first in what could be a series, but it’s unclear), our protagonist and first person narrator is Maggie, a mixed race (half East Indian) teen who has a gift: she helps transition those who have just died, helping them move to the other side. Her gift is particular to those ghosts who are having trouble figuring out what to do after they have passed. But, her talent becomes far more than she bargained for when the high school bully, Serge Popov, is found dead. Serge is none other than Maggie’s primary antagonist, so when Serge is dead, there is some sense that that part of her life has come to an end, until she discovers that Serge is tethered to her and cannot transition to the other side. Having to deal with Serge being with her at almost every waking (and sleeping) moment encourages Maggie to embark on her own unofficial investigation concerning the murky details around Serge’s death. It becomes apparent that Serge was killed, but the murderer’s identity is far from easy to figure out. Thus, Deen’s novel incorporates elements of the paranormal alongside the noir plot. Set in a sleepy, rural Canadian town, the killing of course reverberates through the tight-knit community. Nancy, a police officer and the girlfriend to Maggie’s Dad, is on the case trying to figure out who might have been behind the murder. At the same time, as Maggie dives deeper into her own unofficial investigation, it becomes apparent that Serge’s relationship with his parents was far from ideal. Serge’s father, Reverend Popov, was known to be abusive, while his mother seems to acquiesce to whatever the Reverend says or does. Serge not surprisingly suspects that the Reverend was behind his murder, but Maggie realizes that she must unravel the mystery soon before another person is killed. Though the mystery aspect of the novel disappointed me overall, the novel has an interesting concluding arc along the paranormal spectrum that I wasn’t prepared for and was pleasantly surprised by. Further still, the textures that these concluding sequences add offer Deen the perfect opportunity to create further installments with Maggie as our stubborn, plucky heroine. Another critique of the novel was its use of dialogue; there were times when it was difficult to figure out who was actually doing the speaking. Deen tends to be a minimalist when it comes to signal phrases in relation to dialogue, and the confusion is compounded by the fact that Maggie must often navigate conversations with dead characters and non-dead characters, with the non-dead characters often unable to or aware that the dead characters are in the “scene.” Despite these small critiques, Deen’s Guardian is certainly a recommended read for those interesting in young adult/ paranormal fictions.

Buy the Book here:

http://www.greatplains.mb.ca/buy-books/guardian/

A Review of Oh Yong Hwee (writer) and Koh Hong Teng’s (illustrator) Ten Sticks and One Rice (Epigram Books, 2010).

Ten Sticks and One Rice, penned by Oh Yong Hwee and illustrated by Koh Hong Teng, is published by Epigram Books, a Singaporean publisher. For more on Epigram Books, go here:

http://shop.epigrambooks.sg/

Singapore’s Asian Anglophone literary archive is quite large, one that has been virtually ignored here in the American “West,” but I’ve been encouraged to read much more into this area ever since working with a brilliant undergraduate student, who hails from the powerful city-state and who is always letting me know about the cool new books that are being published over there. Little did I know that there were also a ton of graphic novels and graphic narratives to be reviewing from this area of the world, which brings me to this one today. Our protagonist of Ten Sticks and One Rice is none other than Neo Hock Seng, who is described at the back of the book as an “illegal bookie,” “a secret society member,” and “a street hawker,” who must deal with Singapore as it “transforms from a kampong to a cosmopolitan city… even as he finds his old ways and values increasingly challenged.” At the start of the narrative, Neo Hock Seng is diagnosed with a terminal cancer. At the same time, we discover that one of his closest friends from long ago, Boon Shan, has died. He takes this opportunity to put together a proper funeral, which would include a festive meal and celebration of Boon Shan’s life, as well as an elaborate funeral procession. Boon Shan’s death gives Hock Seng a chance to reflect back upon his life, and the graphic novel often shifts backward in time to periods when he was a young boy and then later when is an adult trying to make ends meet and to provide for his family. His interest in being an illegal bookie and a secret society member certainly stem from the challenges of upward mobility, but he eventually settles into work as a “street hawker,” selling sticks of satay and rice (hence the title). Throughout Hock Seng’s maturation, he maintains some old traditions, even when it causes strain with his friends, who sometimes see him as a holding too hard to outdated social norms and mores, but it becomes evident that Hock Seng’s predilections toward these cultural rituals are in fact a way to strengthen family and friendship ties. By the conclusion of the graphic narrative, we see that his own family is starting to shift in their cultural practices, something that Hock Seng cannot control, but the conclusion is one that clarifies that Hock Seng does not seek to impose his will upon his childrens’ live. He only gently reminds them of what good can come from honoring the past. The artwork is able to convey the gravity of Hock Seng’s life and does a great job of fleshing out the changes in his face over the years. The one area that could have been improved is the clarification in time shifts; it might have been useful to have another grayscale employed whenever the narrative moved back in the past, as the cuts sometimes seemed slightly abrupt. Despite this small critique, the graphic narrative is well worth reading, especially as it dovetails with the discourses of hypermodernization that have long seen associated with Singapore as one of the Asian “tiger” economies. What is being lost in this relentless drive to become a global city, the narrative might seem to be elliptically asking? Hock Seng would tell us to make sure to look into the local past before we step so stridently into the global future.

Buy the Book Here:

http://shop.epigrambooks.sg/products/ten-sticks-and-one-rice

A Review of Vikram Paralkar’s The Afflictions (with illustrations by Amanda Thomas) (Lanternfish Press, LLC).

Vikram Paralkar’s The Afflictions is a curious, but formalistically innovative work that one would probably not call a novel (or set of stories), but rather a fictional encyclopedia filled with imagined diseases. On a personal note, I very much enjoyed reading this compendium of made-up maladies precisely because my mother is a pathologist. I grew up with phrases such as “malignant melanoma” and “Creutzfeldt-Jakob” being bandied about in conversation over breakfast. Thus, I read Paralkar’s work with much gusto and easily finished it one sitting. There is a frame narrative that accompanies the fictional Encyclopedia of diseases, which involves a librarian talking to an individual named Máximo, an apothecary, who is being shown the document. The librarian gives Máximo the occasional tidbit about his or her own life (I can’t quite recall if the work marks any gender for this narrator-figure), while also relaying some choice details about the structure and the thematic unity of the Encyclopedia. The frame narrative is what gives this work a general sense of forward movement; it is quite essential because otherwise what you read are a vast array of strange diseases with equally strange manifestations: for instance, in one case, one of the illness involves the growing of wings upon a person’s back. The reason for “catching” such a disease is constituted by the patient’s desire to move beyond the bounds of his or her subject position. Here, Paralkar uses the disease manifestation as an obvious manifestation of a figure who dreams probably too big and thus cannot seem to accomplish his or her goals. In the case of Exilium volatile, “When ships sail over the broadest expanses of ocean, their passengers become vulnerable” (64) to this particular malady in which “they grope for memories that might lend them some sense of belonging, but unable to find any, they believe for a terrible instant that the sum of their existence lies confined within the ship that carries them” (65). The disease manifests acutely during the voyage, only to subside when “their vessel approaches its harbor” (65). Again, Paralkar uses this illness as a metaphor for the internal struggles of migrant figures, who attempt to situate a stable sense of home, as they must move from one place to another. For all of the generalities of the disease compendium, there is a general sense that the narrative is set in the Old World (Italy), sometime perhaps in the Early modern period. As in practically all cases, the diseases are somehow connected to emotional states of being that involve individuals and larger communities, but the fanciful nature of this encyclopedia does have darker ramifications. Indeed, by the conclusion of this work, you can’t help but wonder about the necessity of disease taxonomies, whether or not actual maladies that exist in medical literature today may somehow be imagined. An intriguing and innovatively structured fictional work.

Buy the Book Here (and find out more about a cool indie press):

http://lanternfishpress.com/

A Review Maria Chaudhuri’s Beloved Strangers (Bloomsbury, 2014).

Over time, it’s become fairly clear that I enjoy the memoir form because of its voyeuristic qualities. The best in this genre, in my humble opinion, really appear no different from lyrical diaries: excruciating details that are perhaps meant only to be read by the person writing them, but somehow (as readers) we chance upon these texts and receive access. We are invited into a realm, then, that seems so intimate. The oddity of the memoir is of course the actual distance that can exist between reader and writer. My response after reading Maria Chaudhuri’s Beloved Strangers was one that I could not actually act upon: I wanted to call this Maria Chaudhuri up and tell her what a wonderful thing she had shared with me, but who was I: nothing but this distant reader, a veritable outsider. I could have called myself a beloved stranger, but such a moniker would have been obviously hyperbolic. The memoir is this kind of genre then that invites the intimacy of the reader without actually allowing for it. In the best memoirs, you are frustrated by this intimacy because you realize, then, this incredible distance. The distance is of course one way to get at how these connections between reader and writer cannot be made superficially. Indeed, Chauduri’s poetically rendered work is very specific in its contexts. The author grows up in Bangladesh in a home filled with half silences and unexpressed feelings; not surprisingly, given her highly introspective nature, she seeks escape and soon finds it by going to the United States for her college education. The course of the narrative spends most of the time focusing on the narrator’s distant relationship to both of her parents as well as detailing two major but “failed” romantic relationships; much less is spent upon her connection to her siblings (with the exception of her sister Naveen). Chaudhuri doesn’t shy away from the messy and the murk of romance and family; this ability to look as squarely as possible into her own shortcomings and the elliptical language of love and self-delusion is what makes Beloved Strangers so haunting in its many evocations.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/beloved-strangers-9781620406229/

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Published on December 21, 2014 14:59

November 29, 2014

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for November 29 2014

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for November 29 2014 (Thanksgiving Holidaze)

Today is the day I am moving into a new place and starting a new (and I hope better) chapter of my life. I am still reading Asian American literature despite all the upheaval and still am finding much to laud about the publications that continue to emerge. After you’ve eaten a lot of leftover turkey, what better way to spend your time but read some books!

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

In this (ladies centric) post, reviews of Sarah Jamila Stevenson’s Underneath (Flux Books, 2013); Sarah Jamila Stevenson’s The Truth Against the World (Flux, 2014); Suki Kim’s Without You There is No Us: My Time with the Son’s of North Korea’s Elite (Crown, 2014); Jenny Han and Siobhan Vivian’s Ashes for Ashes (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2016); Xiaolu Guo’s I am China (Nan A. Talese, 2014); Kim Sunée’s A Mouthful of Stars (Andrews McNeel Publishing, 2014); Melissa de la Cruz’s Vampires of Manhattan: The New Blue Bloods Coven (Hyperion, 2014); MariNaomi’s Dragon’s Breath and Other True Stories (Uncivilized Books, 2014).

A Review of Sarah Jamila Stevenson’s Underneath (Flux Books, 2013).

Sarah Jamila Stevenson’s second novel is Underneath (after The Latte Rebellion, which we have already reviewed here in Asian American Literature Fans). In Underneath, our protagonist and narrator is Sunny Pryce-Shah. The novel begins in the wake of the suicide of Sunny Pryce-Shah’s college-aged cousin Shiri, a seemingly popular and smart young woman who had what most perceive as very little reason to take her own life. In the tragic aftermath of her death, her family is of course grieving, especially her Aunt Mina (Shiri’s mother) and her husband (Uncle Randall). But Sunny’s sense of deep loss comes with it a special power, something she calls “underhearing,” which is the ability to hear other people’s thoughts. This power is not fully controllable and she is only able to tap into these thought patterns at seemingly random moments. Most acutely, these thoughts make her aware that her popular friends at school, especially a rival named Cassie, are not her friends at all, and she begins to transition to a new set of acquaintances. These acquaintances are none other than a group of misfits, who are nonetheless apparently cool enough to still hang out with, including a goth-hipster named Cody and the spirited and brash Mikaela. Stevenson quickly sets up romance triangles. Sunny has an obvious like of the darkly attired Cody, but can’t forget her old childhood friend who might be more than a friend (named Spike, who is also part of the popular crowd). At the same time, Sunny’s interest in Cody is one possibly contested by Mikaela, who seems to have an interest in Cody. Thus Sunny’s entrance into this new set of friends is already a tense one, and she struggles to fit in with this new crowd, one interested in the occult (wiccan) and new age practices (meditation). At the same time, things are heating up at home, Auntie Mina is undergoing a trial separation from her husband due in part to domestic abuse. Sunny’s abilities in underhearing allow her to understand how much is being kept from her by her parents, but her knowledge of the situation encourages her to be more courageous and ask difficult questions. In this sense, Stevenson’s novel is essentially a coming-of-age story and the conceit of underhearing is simply a tool to get at issues of high-school ostracization, mental illness, and domestic abuse, the three main conflicts and issues at play. The conceit of underhearing is an interesting one, but it seems to be a kind of red herring in this particular fictional world, and one wonders if it is even necessary at all, especially given how sensitive a character Sunny is already made out to be. In my opinion, Stevenson should have run away with the underhearing as a paranormal element if that was to be so central, but it ends up being too peripheral in my opinion to warrant as part of this already-packed novel. Stevenson’s most fundamental representational approach is perhaps her ability to weave in racial and ethnic signifiers in a very inconspicuous way. Sunny is half-Pakistani, for instance, a fact that is not necessarily a source of great discomfort, but yet still informs her identity as a high school student and an upper middle class subject. Mikaela, too, is not only marked in terms of a working class background, but clearly and also subtly through her ethnoracial background as a Chicana. The texture given to Stevenson’s fictional worlds is made that much more rich in clarifying the not-quite-postracial contexts of this high school based narrative, something that makes this work stand out in terms of its adherence to the protocols of realism (rather than escapism) and its associated political undercurrents. An uneven, but nevertheless intriguing venture into the YA fiction/ romance realm, with just a hint of the paranormal.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Underneath-Sarah-Jamila-Stevenson/dp/0738735965/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1413644571&sr=8-2&keywords=sarah+jamila+stevenson

and Here (for the anti-Amazonians):

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/underneath-sarah-jamila-stevenson/1113557683?ean=9780738735962

A Review of Sarah Jamila Stevenson’s The Truth Against the World (Flux, 2014)

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Sarah Jamila Stevenson’s third effort in the YA genre is The Truth Against the World, which takes an interesting approach to the storytelling by bifurcating the perspectives between a first person narrator a teen named Olwen Nia Evans (living in San Francisco) and third person omniscient narrator who is focalized through a teen named Gareth Lewis (living on the other side of the Atlantic). These two characters are somehow bound to each other, as becomes apparent very early on. Gareth spies a mysterious young girl named Olwen Nia Evans one day, and then later, happens upon a blog written by another person named Olwen Nia Evans. On impulse, he e-mails Olwen, which begins the start of a tentative online friendship. On her end of the Atlantic, Olwen is dealing with the impending death of her great grandmother Gee Gee, who has requested that she be flown back to Wales, the land of her origin, so that she can die peacefully there. Olwen has been having a number of strange dreams about her great grandmother and a young girl and can’t make sense of them. It becomes apparent that Olwen might be having visions that connect her to Gee Gee’s past, but her great grandmother is far from forthcoming about her life as a young woman. By the time that Olwen is in Wales, she realizes that she is being haunted by some sort of force that needs to be acknowledged. By this point, Gareth has decided to visit his great-grandfather in Wales, which gives him the chance to meet Olwen in person, and perhaps to find out why their connection is so strong. Their adventures are momentarily thrown into disarray when Gee Gee dies, but the visions and dreams related to the mysterious young girl that Gareth saw at a cromlech in the opening of the novel and that continue to plague Olwen’s nights encourage them to continue on their search to figure out why the girl’s spirit demands to be placated.
Readers may get impatient with Stevenson’s narrative storytelling as the romance and the central mystery are both telegraphed to the extent that most astute readers should be able to guess what happened far before the actual revelation. Thus, much of the narrative momentum begins to wane earlier than it should, but the political and social texture of the novel is far more intricate than the localized plots. Those interested in World War II in the European theater will find much of interest in this novel. References to Land Girls, evacuations, bombs, Welsh ethnic identity, as well as the growing tensions between the English and the Welsh all contribute to a historically expansive world that has made Stevenson’s work as a whole a refreshing addition to the YA genre, which often gets mired in the relatively apolitical heft of high school angst plots. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the novel is the perfect study in something called the “transgenerational phantom,” the term used by Abraham and Torok for traumas that are borne out on a successive generations when an injury or violent moment is kept secret. Gee Gee’s inability to divulge what happened to her manifest in some form in the obsessive desire that Olwen has to find her history. The “secret” is of course none other than the one embodied by the young girl’s ghost who haunts until the source of Gee Gee’s trauma can finally be unveiled. Certainly, a “spirited” addition to the YA paranormal romance genre.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Truth-Against-World-Jamila-Stevenson/dp/0738740586/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1414085939&sr=8-1&keywords=sarah+jamila+stevenson

A Review of Suki Kim’s Without You There is No Us: My Time with the Son’s of North Korea’s Elite (Crown, 2014).

Suki Kim is part of what I called the “first novelist’s club,” which is my fond way of categorizing a writer whose debut I absolutely love and whose second book was nowhere to be seen. Kim’s debut novel Interpreter absolutely riveted me and was the subject of a portion of a dissertation chapter. I eagerly anticipated Kim’s next publication, which is this memoir and which follows a period of over a decade since her first novel’s release. The wait was obviously well worth it, as Kim pens a detailed, insightful, and frank memoir concerning North Korea that sheds light upon a notoriously secretive country and government. Kim’s interest in North Korea begins in part because of an identification with the culture and due to exposure to that country through various journalism assignments. As this interest grows into an obsession, Kim applies to teach there, under the guise of a Christian missionary instructor. Eventually she is admitted and so begins her tenure as an instructor of English at a Christian-oriented institution. While she is there, she begins to realize what a unique school it actually is. Her students seem to come from elite backgrounds, something that she begins to discern as she is given glimpses beyond the institution. The occasional field trip to a specific site such as an apple orchard and farm, occasionally allows her to see the extreme impoverishment in the local community. Throughout the memoir, Kim struggles in her position as an instructor. Though she immediately takes a strong liking to her earnest and seemingly innocent students, she realizes that she cannot simply spout out democratically-informed messages or rhetoric, nor can see expect her students to open their eyes to the incredible social inequality occurring just beyond the bounds of school. Kim realizes that she must play a dangerous game, figuring out how to teach without endangering herself or her students, while at the same time, gaining more information that may be valuable to a book project. Her time at the school while rewarding in some ways is also extremely draining, and Kim leaves her first period there wondering if she will return for another term. She eventually decides to return and upon arriving realizes that her students have missed her. Though the warm welcome she receives is of course gratifying, the monotony and the self-censorship the job requires continues to take its toll. The memoir ends around the time that Kim Jong-il has died, a fitting conclusion given the limited impact that Kim can hope to make on students who seem so desperately to want to express their deepest hidden feelings. The memoir includes an intriguing author’s note which details Kim’s understanding that the composition of this memoir is sure to anger those she worked with as well as the North Korean regime, but readers in the “free” West, as we might call it, have been given an invaluable entrance into a life and culture so rarely seen and understood. A highly recommended read.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Without-You-There-Is-No/dp/0307720659/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1413671372&sr=8-1&keywords=suki+kim

A Review of Jenny Han and Siobhan Vivian’s Ashes for Ashes (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2016). Hardcover. $17.99

I finished the final book—Ashes for Ashes—in Jenny Han and Siobhan Vivian’s Burn for Burn Trilogy on the very same night that it arrived on my doorstep. I used it as an award for working through some revisions, and it was that very decadent kind of reward, one that goes best with an equally sinful dessert. In the final installment, Han and Vivian can finally go full-on Carrie (and spoilers are now forthcoming, so do not read on at this point if you want to avoid knowing too much). Mary is dead, and she’s a ghost. One of our three primary narrators has always been a ghost, but now Mary knows she’s a ghost, and she’s aiming to continue her pursuit of revenge at all costs, especially now that Kat and Lillia seem less interested in revenge schemes. As always, Mary’s main target of vengeance is Reeve, the popular high school jock who had spurned her as a young girl and whose bullying ended up seriously contributing to her suicide. But, Lillia and Kat are now also seen as betrayers, so they too must be dealt with. As Mary finds out more about her status as a ghost, she realizes she has far more powers than she at first understood. She can invade people’s dreams and when focusing her anger, can even make things move. She also learns how to appear at will in front of people. Of course, it takes awhile before Lilia and Kat figure out what badness Mary is up to, and they have their hands full with various things. Kat’s still looking to see if she can get into college, while also juggling a budding friendship with Alex Lind, a teenage boy from the popular set, who respects Kat’s musical talents and tastes. For his part, Alex Lind is considering going to USC, though it would be located far from his unrequited paramour, who is none other than Lillia Cho. In the meantime, Lillia is still madly in love with Reeve; they go about dating surreptitiously until their romance is unceremoniously and inadvertently unveiled at school on Valentine’s Day. Mary, being able to observe things unnoticed, continues to see how life is moving on without her, and not surprisingly, her anger grows. Of course, Mary’s has plans to undo Lillia’s romance, Kat’s desire to go to college, and Reeve’s attempt to remake his life in the wake of an accident that left his college football career in doubt. While YA often gets pigeonholed as a lowbrow genre, what gets left behind is how entertaining the genre can be, despite its perceived shortcomings. Indeed, Han and Vivian’s collaborative work rises above so many others because they have an exceptional hold on the voices of their characters, which have only become increasingly refined and made more precise over the course of the trilogy. As these voices ring so authentically, the story, however implausible, still holds our attention, which makes Ashes for Ashes such a fitting conclusion to the series. To be sure, my early critiques of this series remain: Jar Island seems relatively insular; there is a very ahistorical sense of place and time. The one moment where I got a sense of when the story could be taking place was the moment that Lillia tells her father that Reeve had scored above 1200 on his SATs, a reference that would place the narrative before (2006) the redesign of the exam that makes it now scored out of 2400 (but will apparently revert back to 1600 in 2016). In any case, even with such criticisms in place, Han and Vivian’s novel is an engrossing one, especially for fans devoted to the paranormal/ romance plots that populate YA fictions so often these days. The use of three first person perspectives gives this work a texture and polyvocality that sparks off the page. Whereas Lillia’s romantic persona may be cloying to some, Kat’s no nonsense tough girl attitude will have others breaking out in laughter, and of course, most will be able to identify with the wounded heart at the center of Mary’s vengeful ghostliness as well as her desire to make her injuries palpable to the increasingly forgetful world around her.

Buy The Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Ashes-Burn-Jenny-Han/dp/1442440813/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1414046785&sr=8-1&keywords=ashes+for+ashes

A Review of Xiaolu Guo’s I am China (Nan A. Talese, 2014).

I’m beginning to shift over new links for these posts. I am either going to use direct publisher links, or sellers other than amazon for purchase. I’ve had requests from various readers that such a practice might be a better one, especially in light of what had occurred with Hatchette Book group (and the associated pricing war). In any case, now on to this review! Wow! What an uneven but brilliant, polyvocal novel. In Guo’s latest, I am China (after a number of novels), the narrative perspective primarily follows three character: Iona, who is a translator living in London, and then the subjects of her translations: Kublai Jian, a dissident musician who escapes China, only to subsist in the asylum system in Europe; and Mu, Kublai Jian’s lover. Iona is given a stack of Jian and Mu’s letters as well as portions of diaries and journals written by each character; she does not really know their story at the time, so her translation job is difficult. Indeed, much of the novel revolves around the challenges of translation, especially in light of how little one might know of the subjects. Iona struggles with how to interpret and reorder direct translations so as to capture the essence of what is being communicated, but Kublai Jian and Mu’s identities are shrouded in so much secrecy that Iona cannot finally find solid grounding. With some help from a former professor as well as the publisher who had originally sent her the packet of materials, Iona begins to make bigger headway. Kublai Jian’s story emerges in fits and starts, revealing his desire to change China through rock and punk music. Mu’s story intertwines with Jian’s in their love for each other. They eventually bear a son who dies while he is very young. Thus begins the rupture between the two characters. By the time that Jian has created a rock manifesto that requires him to escape China, the two characters have embarked on separate trajectories. For her part, Mu joins a transnational Chinese rock band touring the United States. The experience, while illuminating, is also traumatic. Mu is raped by the tour manager and ultimately is disillusioned by the Chinese diasporic population (especially as embodied by the Harvard students) who seem to support the current governmental regime. As Iona continues to translate the letters, journal entries, fragments, and diaries (the text is multigenre in that there are also photographs embedded, along with scans of identity cards), she discovers that Kublai Jian is very likely the son of a high ranking governmental official; his identity is only revealed after some research by the publisher Jonathan, who lets Iona know that Kublai Jian is the son of the current prime minister of China. But the story, at the end of the day, is really Iona’s. She’s drawn so deeply into the story because of her own life, which begins to feel empty in light of the poignant but star-crossed love between Jian and Mu. Her anonymous sexual encounters begin to weigh heavily on her, and she desires something more, a lasting connection that might move toward something greater than herself. As Iona’s translation project becomes more feverish and frantic, she also yearns for greater support from Jonathan, a complicated connection given that she knows that Jonathan is married. Guo’s work has so much going on that sometimes it’s hard to follow all of the different threads, but this novel is ambitious and operatic, and the multigenre and the multiperspectival form is exactly the right one for the extraordinarily political message that it conveys. The title is of course gesturing to the rise of the individual and free thinking in Chinese society, a very timely thematic especially given al that is going on in Hong Kong. We can imagine Kublai Jian, were he a living character, finding much in line with pro-democracy supports in that area of the world just about now. Definitely a recommended read.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/i-am-china-xiaolu-guo/1118601543?ean=9780385538725

A Review of Kim Sunée’s A Mouthful of Stars (Andrews McNeel Publishing, 2014).

Kim Sunée follow-up to her memoir Trail of Crumbs is A Mouthful of Stars, which is primarily a cookbook, but also includes narrative excerptions that provide contexts and inspirations for various recipes. In Trail of Crumbs Kim occasionally included a recipe, and given all of the references to dinner parties that occurred, you knew that Kim had a real talent for cooking. Thus, A Mouthful of Stars is a natural place for Kim to go as her next publication. A unique and welcome element of this cookbook is Kim’s long introductory sequence, which gives the reader time to get settled into Kim’s personal history and how that has more largely informed who she is beyond her identity as a cook and as a writer. In this case, Kim tracks her experiences traveling to Korea and searching for her birth family, a quest that allows her to meet a number of other Korean adoptees (such as the poet Lee Herrick!) and puts her in touch with various people who may or may not be blood relatives. Naturally, this experience is a complicated one and brings up memories of the past, issues related to human trafficking, and of course, the meals that one must eat while traveling. The narrative sequence is long enough for some of the more traditional readers to yearn for another memoir all on its own, but soon the cookbook shifts into high gear with the first section devoted to Korean food recipes with Kim’s own personal spin on each dish. From there, the cookbook truly travels all over the world, reflecting in part Kim’s own itinerant and adventurous spirit, with sections devoted to cuisines inspired by her times in France, Scandinavia, Italy, and her years growing up in the American South. One of the dangers of reading this cookbook is of course that it will make you incredibly hungry. The photography is lush and panoramic, and it’s quite apparent that cookbooks are as much about being travelogues and artistic projects as they are about being handbooks for creating the next perfect meal. I read this cookbook before bedtime, and I had to struggle not to get up and make something to eat. Though I’m far from a cook myself, it’s clear that Kim has created a mostly accessible set of recipes that run the gamut from main courses to extravagant desserts. Cooks and enthusiasts of food will certainly find much to inspire them (and to make them hungry) in Kim’s A Mouthful of Stars.

Buy the Book Here:

http://andrewsmcmeel.com/books/detail?sku=9781449430085

A Review of Melissa de la Cruz’s Vampires of Manhattan: The New Blue Bloods Coven (Hyperion, 2014).

Well, I may have to put a moratorium on reviewing novels by Melissa de la Cruz. At this point, I feel as though I may have to review ten of her novels every year just to be able to keep up. In any case, Melissa de la Cruz’s latest offering is Vampires of Manhattan: The New Blue Bloods Coven, which seems to be a re-vamp (see what I did there) the original Blue Bloods series. The characters are all ten years older, but conveniently don’t look like they have aged a day. Perhaps, the vampire is thus the best literary tool for capitalist marketability and consumption: they never age, so as characters, you get to tell a billion stories with them in it. In this case, the returning cast is made up of Oliver Hazard-Perry, who has now become Regent of the Coven; and Mimi Martin (nee Force), who has returned from the Underworld and is on a trial separation from her Fallen Angel hubbie Kingsley Martin. Oliver Hazard-Perry’s human familiar Finn is planning the 400 Year Ball, but there is also a serial killer loose threatening to ruin the festivities. Yes, a young teenaged girl has been found murdered, with the requisite bite marks that suggest that a vampire is behind the killing. Then, yet another teenager is found dead with the same m.o. On the case are two venators, otherwise known as otherworldly vampire cops, Ara Scott and her reluctant partner in crime, Edon Marrok, who is some sort of hellwolf humanoid. Their search turns up few leads until they realize that Kingsley Martin might be involved somehow in the crimes. Indeed, Kingsley, who had supposedly been staying in hell, eventually decides to leave and reunites with his overjoyed but nevertheless still smarting wife, Mimi. As with previous efforts, de la Cruz toggles a third person perspective among the major characters. At this point, de la Cruz has mastered this kind of writing style, so I keep hoping that she will break out of it and do some experimentation, which hasn’t quite happened yet. The novel contains what lovers of romance and paranormal genres will love, but much of this novel feels a bit hollowed out. Indeed, halfway through, de la Cruz moves the narrative five weeks into the past and the revelations by going in this direction do not really warrant this kind of anachronic sequencing and left much of the novel flagging in its momentum. The late stage reveal of the murderer was definitely unexpected, but I would suggest that only diehard fans of the vampire novel and de la Cruz’s previous works should pick this one up.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-vampires-of-manhattan-melissa-de-la-cruz/1117993388?ean=9781401330811

A Review of MariNaomi’s Dragon’s Breath and Other True Stories (Uncivilized Books, 2014).

MariNaomi’s follow-up to Kiss and Tell is Dragon’s Breath and Other True Stories, a set of compiled comics that is not unlike her first effort, with an emphasis of dysfunctional relationships, coming-of-age narratives, and questions of identity. The collection is more or less told in a roughly chronological order. The early comics portray the author’s life as a young child and the common issues that might arise during that period. In one of the best sequences, the author conveys how her love for her grandfather was destabilized when she later discovered how her grandfather actively and violently disapproved of the author’s father, who had married a woman of Japanese descent. This story sets the tone for the rest of the comics, as we come to understand that MariNaomi is trying to convey past experiences from a retrospective viewpoint, as time shifts how we relate to our memories and what people have meant to us. Even the most tragic and painful ruptures come to be resignified by MariNaomi’s drawings and narratives. Much of the collection is elegiac in the sense that there are people that MariNaomi knew that vanish out of her life; some die and others simply fall away so that she does not know where they are or if they are even still alive. Since at many points, she subsisted as a kind of vagabond, without a stable home or shelter, the people she meets during this period are very difficult to track down. One such individual she later discovers succumbs to his mental illness and throw himself in front of a BART train. But, as mournful as many of these stories are, MariNaomi also knows how to weave in a sense of the comic, so that moments of deep despair are always balanced with some levity and even mirth. One such sequence involves the author’s love for the band Duran Duran and how she and a bunch of her girlfriends get to attend a party with that very same band. What ensues is perhaps expected: the band fails to live up fully to their expectations and even when their discussion in the car ride home turns a little bit melancholic, MariNaomi reminds them that she was able to steal the underwear of one of the band members and takes it out. Though rendered in comic and sketch-form up until that point, MariNaomi cleverly organizes a section of photographs at the conclusion, which include underwear being held up next to MariNaomi’s mischievously smiling face. The artwork is rendered in MariNaomi’s signature sketch-like style, which function as the perfect vehicle for the themes and contexts of the memoir. MariNaomi’s memoir also includes very minimalist full page panels that are quite refreshing and provide a nice abstracted space from which to imagine full episodes, our minds doing the work of filling out what the rest of the page whites out. A highly recommended read from a new and exciting independent publisher (see link below)!

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.uncivilizedbooks.com/comics/dragons_breath.html

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Published on November 29, 2014 16:58

November 5, 2014

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for November 5, 2014

Asian American Literature Fans - Megareview for November 5, 2014

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for November 5, 2014

In this post, reviews of Randall Mann’s Straight Razor (Persea, 2013); Padma Desai’s Breaking Out: An Indian Woman’s American Journey (MIT Press, 2012); Leonard Chang’s Dispatches from the Cold (Black Heron Press, 2009 paperback reprint); Le Huu Tri’s Prisoner of the Word: A Memoir of the Vietnamese Reeducation Camps (Black Heron Press, 2010); Caroline Tung Richmond’s The Only Thing To Fear (Scholastic, 2014); Kazu Kibuishi’s Escape from Lucien (Scholastic, 2014); Sita Brahmachari’s Jasmine Skies (Albert & Whitman, 2014); Rajan Khanna’s Falling Sky (Pyr, 2014).

A Review of Randall Mann’s Straight Razor (Persea, 2013).

I’ve been meaning to read Randall Mann’s latest, Straight Razor, for quite awhile, but I haven’t been treating my poetry shelf with as much attention as I should. Whenever I dive back into poetry, I am reminded of how much it offers me in terms of linguistic density, sonic innovation, and especially the texture of new vocabulary. Mann’s Straight Razor easily falls in line with his earlier works, especially as he draws from a poetic genealogy inspired by the work of Thom Gunn, Mark Doty, the Language school, and the confessional lyric. I was a little bit disappointed by the pithy description included in the back of the book, describes this collection like so: “Randall Mann’s third collection showcases the debaucheries and traumas of growing up amid San Francisco’s gay scene. These self-possessed new poems combine the regal and raw, with Mann’s renowned ear for poetic form matched by his unflinching eye for longing, alienation, and vice.” While back cover descriptions never ever match up to the complexities offered by a given text (to be sure I love the alliterative phrase, “the regal and raw”), Mann’s collection is as much about the coming-of-age of a young teenager in Florida as it is about an adult traversing the ever murky waters of San Francisco’s gay scene. Indeed, the early arc is devoted to Mann’s teenage and early adulthood years, much of which is spent in Florida, a place that becomes the ground floor for the lyric speaker’s coming to terms with his queerness. I definitely agree with the sentiment that this collection is one that highlights Mann’s ability to use poetic forms, especially the pantoum (for instance, the poignant “September Elegies”), the villanelle (“Hyperbole”), and the sestina (the absolutely haunting “End Words”); he also makes use of rhyming couplets and quatrain structures with alternating rhyming lines. The consistent use of forms is of course one way to master the kind of dynamism inherent to Mann’s poetic content. The constraints of form enable a kind of lyric dissonance that produces a wonderful effect that is playful and often times melancholic and elegiac. For vocabulary lovers, the collection is sure to delight in its usage of esoteric words, including a heady bunch that appear in “Falling Asleep Over ‘Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid’” such as “oneiromancy” (57), “lucubration” (57), “flocculate” (57), “concinnity” (57), and “glabrous.” Finally, Mann’s attentive approach to place is evident all over this collection, especially as evidenced by these lines in “American Apparel”: “This glaring/ unfathomable/ San Francisco summer fog/ like eternity, like plain speech” (66). So we’ll bask in the many wonders in Mann’s latest luminous effort, a collection full of lyric pulchritude and “razor” sharp wit.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Straight-Razor-Poems-Randall-Mann/dp/0892554304/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1413180699&sr=8-1&keywords=straight+razor+mann

A Review of Padma Desai’s Breaking Out: An Indian Woman’s American Journey (MIT Press, 2012).

I was startled to see that MIT press had published a memoir, one that had Asian American themes written all over it and well, I had to review it. Little did I realize that I had a distant connection to the memoir writer, whose daughter (Anuradha) and my sister are actually acquaintances from their time serving in the US Marine Corps. Somewhere toward the conclusion of the memoir Padma Desai describes how Anuradha ended up joining an activist organization, one my sister had been involved in, and then I recalled her discussing some of her colleagues in that organization, one of whom was named Anu and then, I finally put two and two together. That surprise of course changed the remainder of my reading in the sense that the memoirist was made a little more familiar than I could have ever guessed. In any case, Padma’s life is certainly extraordinary, one worthy of a memoir. By making this statement, I tend to have a kind of cynical eye when it comes to memoirs, only insofar as I wonder what makes one life worth writing about in this way. In Desai’s case, she broke many boundaries as an Indian woman who travels to the United States, gets her PhD at Harvard at a time when most of her graduate colleagues where white men, receives a tenured professorship at Columbia and in the process uproots her husband, who agrees to follow her there, even though he would be giving up a tenured professorship at MIT. Padma grows up in a family that certainly provides her with a way to think independently, but even her liberal minded father would not have predicted her path that would take her to the highest reaches of economics and involve crossing national boundaries numerous times. The most painful sequence explored is Desai’s first marriage made to a man who clearly had seduced her and did not have her best interests at heart. Because of conservative Indian marriage laws and her own hesitancies, it takes a number of years before Desai is able to end this marriage and follow her heart to Jagdish, a man two years her junior, with a perennially sunny disposition and a penchant for eating food off her plate. Though family members seem hesitant at this union for a number of reasons, it obviously is the right one, and Padma flourishes from this point forward. She manages to figure out why she can’t get pregnant, beats the odds, raises an independent-minded daughter (not unlike herself), all the while maintaining a marriage in which both parties blossom in their careers. Desai certainly seems to have constructed her form of an American dream, but it’s apparent that it is one only achieved through a tireless work ethic and desire to strive and with an intent to engage all the contours of what it means to be an Indian woman in America. As she writes, “I carried with me the constraining burden of a traditional Indian upbringing and the gruesome consequences of a disastrous marriage. I also came [to America] with a fierce academic ambition. I could dissolve the marriage but how could I cease being a brown-skinned Indian woman and be recognized as an American professional rather than an exotic creature from a distant land? Over time I learned to argue openly and decisively. I also learned to think audaciously and to talk colloquially. And I decided to dress differently” (234). Desai’s statement here at the end of the memoir strikes as particularly illuminating, as it undergirds more largely her battle-hardened spirit, one that did not shrink from the struggles she would face. Perhaps, this resistance is the ethos of the immigrant spirit.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Out-Indian-American-Journey/dp/0262019973/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410998225&sr=8-1&keywords=padma+desai

A Review of Leonard Chang’s Dispatches from the Cold (Black Heron Press, 2009 paperback reprint).

Originally published in 1998, Leonard Chang’s Dispatches from the Cold was the only work left by Chang that I had not yet read. It’s an interesting one to come to last and perhaps his most experimental in approach. The novel was Chang’s second (after The Fruit ’N Food and before the Allen Choice detective trilogy: Over the Shoulder, Underkill, and Fade to Clear, and after that, Crossings and Triplines). Dispatches from the Cold is told primarily from the first person perspective from an unnamed narrator who is an out of work high school biology teacher turned diner dishwasher. He lives in a rundown area in a very cheap apartment that was once being rented out by a heroin addict named Mona Gorden. Mona Gorden is receiving a bunch of letters (snail mail) from her brother Farrel Gorden. Farrel doesn’t seem to care that Mona isn’t ever writing back; he seems to be most interested in the fact that he has a potential audience, someone to spout off his various ramblings about this daily trials, his existential ennui as a salesman and employee at a sporting goods store, as well as the ongoing problems with his underage 17 year-old live-in girlfriend named Shari. The unnamed narrator takes a kind of obsessive interest in these letters, so much so that the book that the reader is reading is actually something that is written by the unnamed narrator himself (or something along these lines). Indeed, the unnamed narrator has been driven to write about his experiences with these letters, as he gets increasingly involved in imagining what Farrel Gorden is going through. Even though the unnamed narrator only has the letters to go off of, he often goes further in imagining the events and things going on in Farrel’s life. These take the form of third person perspectives and have a kind of omniscient quality that is strange given the fact that the unnamed narrator can never really know what Farrel might have been thinking or doing beyond what is communicated in the letters. Farrel Gorden (mostly called Gorden in the novel) begins to have an unhealthy infatuation with his new Korean American boss’s wife (named Helen); over time, they are drawn together and begin to have an affair. Of course, we can tell that things are not going to end up well, especially since Helen is married, and Gorden has a girlfriend. When things can and do go wrong, there is an interesting discourse that Chang is developing in relation to the participation of the reader. In this case, should the unnamed narrator act when he knows something might be happening that the reader might actually be able to prevent. The meta-discourse of this novel is fascinating in that way, especially as reader and writer become pitted against each other (in the fictional world). To take it a step back, Chang’s novel makes you wonder about the place of the reader in relation to any text and the relationship that the reader might make with characters. The resonance of this novel (at least for me) appears in the subtle manner by which Chang seems to suggest that representations can have material bearing on a reader’s existence even when said representations are fictional. But, if I’m getting a little bit too intellectual about it, I will state that the unnamed narrator’s own story is mysterious in such a way he comes off as his own aporia, something that the actual reader cannot get past. The conclusion of the novel wraps up a bit quickly and I found the logic of it confusing, but as a whole, Dispatches from the Cold is one of Chang’s most compelling works because of its interesting narrative conceits and the question that the narrative brings up concerning the reader, the writer, and their twisted and often antagonistic relationships to each other. Oh, and the other thing: the novel is really interesting to read in light of the rise of e-mail: one wonders what this novel would have been like had it been written even ten years later in light of the rise of the internet. Would Farrel Gorden been sending Mona e-mails she never would have replied to? Maybe the letters would have been facebook updates instead! =)

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Dispatches-Cold-Leonard-Chang/dp/0930773934/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1411885913&sr=8-9&keywords=leonard+chang

A Review of Le Huu Tri’s Prisoner of the Word: A Memoir of the Vietnamese Reeducation Camps (Black Heron Press, 2010)

(highet res image I could find! sorry)

Le Huu Tri’s Prisoner of the Word: A Memoir of the Vietnamese Reeducation Camps is an unsentimental and even devastating look at life in Vietnam following the end of the war and the hasty evacuation of Americans from the country in April of 1975. For those left behind like Le, the experience of being safe and making do becomes compounded by their association with American capitalists. Because Le had been employed by the South Vietnamese military, he naturally feared for his life. False rumors encourage him to turn himself in when the communists roll into town and from that point forward, he subsists in a variety of different labor camps, often spending whole days having to harvest different plants like cassava or hauling rocks from one place to another. The physical labor obviously takes its toll: Le is often sick, malnourished, and desperate for news from the outside world. What Le makes clear is that the labor camp and the communist cadres who run it are part of a larger system based upon manipulation and rumors. The prisoners are effectively locked in not simply because of fences or barbed wire, but because they are psychically trained to think that the prison is where they are supposed to be and that they will only be able to exit once they have shown their duty and obedience to the communist regime. The belief in this kind of prisoner meritocracy emerges often in the most violent of ways: prisoners are encouraged to rat out on each other to get out of working or even to get released, others are beaten, while still others die because they are out in the fields searching for unexploded mines. For his part, Le begins to uncover and to realize how the labor camp runs; this memoir is an extraordinary testament to the power of the mind to remember and to record the injustices that can be done. Indeed, there is a point at which Le understands the gravity of the illusions that surround him, so much so that—though he knows he cannot write was is occurring to him and his prison-bound friends—he can willfully remember the layouts of the camps he languished in as well as the cadre’s continual manipulation of the prisoners. This memoir is hardly a riveting read: the days seem somewhat repetitive, but therein lies part of the point to be sure. Le isn’t here to write an entertaining story, so much as he is creating a testimony of a dark period of time, one that calls attention to the many atrocities that arise under the guise of the Cold War and international conflict. Because of the monotony and stress of everyday prison life, the few moments of joy become acute: a package from family containing medicine and food, or a bountiful harvest of vegetables from a personal garden take on greater meaning and shine brightly. Certainly, an indispensable addition to the canon of Vietnamese American literatures and one that sheds light upon a little known, but vital narrative in the post-war period. This book should be of interest to fans of Vietnamese American literature, scholars in Asian American studies, historians in the area of the Vietnam War, and general readers of the memoir and creative nonfiction.

For More information about the book, go here

http://blackheronpress.com/prisoner-of-the-word-by-le-huu-tri/

A Review of Caroline Tung Richmond’s The Only Thing To Fear (Scholastic, 2014).

Caroline Tung Richmond’s debut novel The Only Thing to Fear is another inventive addition to the young adult/ paranormal/ romance genre. The novel is told from a third person perspective and primarily is focalized through Zara St. James, a mixed race (Japanese/ Caucasian) individual living in a world in which the Nazis and the Japanese defeated the Americans (and Allies) during World War 2. The United States has been broken up with the Western half being controlled by Japan and the Eastern half being controlled by the Germans/ Nazis. Zara St. James is the product of a forbidden union between a Japanese soldier and an American woman; she is scorned for her mixed background, but she is raised by a doting uncle when her mother is killed during an operation planned by a rebel group called the Alliance. The Alliance is a loose network of those living in Eastern half of United States who are attempting to overthrow the Germans. Zara is sixteen and deemed to be too young to participate in Alliance activities, though her Uncle Redmond is certainly active in the group. Things start to get worse in the town that Zara and Uncle Red live in, which include more active investigations by Nazis and threats of violence and brutality, which culminate in public executions. Zara obviously finds such treatment to be incredibly oppressive and does what she can to resist the Nazis. Richmond adds the romantic element into the equation when a young German military service member approaches Zara with the intent of helping out the alliance. Zara is naturally suspicious and ends up having to use her super secret powers to save them. Yes, not only does Richmond include a counterfactual historical foundation to her novel, but also incorporates Nazi eugenics issues. In this fictional world, German super soldiers are being engineered called Anomalies, some of whom have more than one super power. Occasionally, non-German Anomalies are born, who are usually killed as soon as their powers manifest, so Zara must hide her powers, lest she be discovered and stamped out. Richmond’s premise is certainly interesting and adds so much historical texture that it rises above many others in the genre simply because it must use specific cultural and social contexts in order to come off as reasonably authentic. There is so much going on in this novel that the romance plot comes off as the least needed element, and the late stage resolution to it is not really that surprising. This novel also reminded me a little bit of Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex in its exploration of a counterfactual post-WW2 scenario. It is unclear at this time whether this novel is part of an intended series, so we’ll have to wait and see. Definitely a recommended read for young adult fiction lovers.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Only-Thing-Fear-Caroline-Richmond/dp/0545629888/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1413053538&sr=8-1&keywords=the+only+thing+to+fear

A Review of Kazu Kibuishi’s Escape from Lucien (Scholastic, 2014).

Fans of the Amulet series should be delighted that the sixth installment, Escape from Lucien, is here. The series has gone into new directions now with old foes becoming tentative allies and the main protagonist, Emily and Navin Hayes, exploring their own heroic paths. The plot is roughly noted as follows: “Navin and his classmates journey to Lucien, a city ravaged by war and plagued by mysterious creatures, where they search for a beacon essential to their fight against the Elf King. Meanwhile, Emily heads back into the Void with Max, one of the Elf King's loyal followers, where she learns his darkest secrets. The stakes, for both Emily and Navin, are higher than ever” (Official Scholastic Website; see link below). The “mysterious creatures” that Navin and his classmates battle are nothing other than shadows, beings with the ability to take control of any living thing such that they become something akin to zombies. Their only goal is to make more living beings turn into themselves. Navin teams up with inhabitants of Lucien in order to help more of the residents escape the underground city, which now has become overrun with the shadows. The mayor of the city leads the inhabitants out, while Navin and a select crew stay behind on what seems to be a suicide mission to keep the shadows from pursuit. In Emily’s storyline, she comes to learn the background of the Stonekeeper’s curse, especially as she travels with Vigo Light, Trellis, and Max Griffin to confront the “voice” that emanates from the stone. In their battle with the voice, Emily learns the background to Vigo and Max’s curse and further discovers why Max has not been aging. This installment also pushes Trellis in an entirely new direction that will have great bearing for the future of this series. As always, the production values in Kibuishi’s series is top notch, especially with a team of others to help complete the comics (allowing perhaps the series installments to be published at a quicker rate). The full color spectrum Kibuishi can use gives his work a wonderful high-fantasy realism that will continue to attract new readers. Perhaps, the one minor critique that can be made is that a series of this length, and which seems destined to continue for much longer, can be frustrating for the fan who returns to the story only to have bits and pieces of the previous five books remain forgotten. But, I suppose, this fault of memory gives encourages us to re-read, which is a kind of reading pleasure that we all wish we could make more time for in order to revisit the stories we love the most.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/escape-from-lucien-kazu-kibuishi/1119479005?ean=9780545433150

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/book/escape-lucien#cart/cleanup

A Review of Sita Brahmachari’s Jasmine Skies (Albert & Whitman, 2014).

(US Cover)

(I believe this may be the UK cover?)

Sita Brahmachari’s sequel to Mira in the Present Tense is Jasmine Skies, which follows the same first person present tense narration employed in the original. Mira Levenson, at the encouragement of family members with the exception of a reluctant mother, is off to India, to visit relatives in Kolkata. Mira is soon buffeted by a very difficult cultural milieu, which includes the radical disparities in wealth Mira observes between the rich and the poor and stratification based upon caste standing. Mira’s time in India is spent doing a number of things, including doing some sightseeing, either with Priya, her cousin, or her aunt, Anjali. Anjali is actually the cousin of Mira’s mom (Anjali and Uma were actually born on the same day and in some sense are bonded in a kind of unofficial sisterhood), though their connection to each other has long been a subject of great mystery. Indeed, though it was apparent that Anjali and Mira’s mother (named Uma) were once quite close, they undergo some sort of rupture which is undisclosed to Mira by the time she has left for India. Part of her goal in traveling to India is to find out what happened between them. Mira steals a set of letters written between Anjali and Uma that reveals the event that sparked the schism but only in elliptical ways, something alluded to as an event that happened when they were about the same age as Mira at the start of the novel. Part of the mystery might be unraveled, or so Mira believes, by visiting the home of her maternal grandfather, which had passed out of family ownership some time ago and sits in a relatively dilapidated state. Additionally, the romance that bloomed in book 1 between Mira and Jidé is tested by the distance between them. Mira soon finds herself attracted to a young man by the name of Janu; he grew up in a refuge that her aunt has helped run for a number of years. Janu’s friendly nature and his handsome face easily distract Mira and the bonds of her relationship to Jidé are necessarily unstabilized. Eventually, Anjali discovers that Mira has been reading the set of letters that had between written between her and Mira’s mother Uma. This revelation causes considerable tension between the two characters. Anjali must decide whether or not she will tell what Mira has done and obviously whether or not she will go on to detail what had occurred between her and Mira’s mother as young teenagers. The novel’s conclusion is a complicated one and brings up the question of individual desire and cultural tradition in the face of great wealth inequality and caste stratification. The novel can never address the fundamental question is brings up except on a microcosmic scale concerning how the upper-middle class subject can necessarily be a politically progressive individual on the one hand, while claiming the privilege of existing in a particularly elevated social position. Mira’s family and by extension Anjali’s are never endangered in terms of their class and caste statuses, and the construction of the refuge becomes one way that the family attempts to give back, but when the rupture between Anjali and Uma is finally revealed, you can see that Brahmachari is going after a larger social ill, one that remains a great issue all over the globe. Mira’s naivete is obviously rendered in this text, and it is a necessary perspective that shows how little she understands concerning the incredible challenges of the lives that surround her, but Brahmachari gives her a minor and important redemption in terms of the ability of art to at least bring a measure of comfort to the lives of the destitute and the downtrodden. There are no easy answers and if anything, the novel’s central focus on Mira is perhaps less important than the social contexts that the novel gestures to and requires the reader to reconsider in light of Mira’s status as a transnational elite.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Mira-Present-Tense-Sita-Brahmachari/dp/080755149X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1413392466&sr=8-1&keywords=mira+in+the+present+tense

A Review of Rajan Khanna’s Falling Sky (Pyr, 2014).

Rajan Khanna’s debut novel is Falling Sky. For some reason, I originally thought the novel was a young adult fiction about aliens (you can guess that just based upon the title), but I wouldn’t categorize it that way. It instead follows in line with the postapocalyptic zombie fiction and cultural productions that have been all the rage lately (think of The Walking Dead, Jonathan Maberry’s Rot & Ruin, World War Z, Zombieland, etc). Interestingly enough, there haven’t been many American writers of Asian descent that have taken on zombies as a specific plot conceit (two I can think of off hand are Linda Watanabe McFerrin’s Dead Love and S.P. Somtow’s Darker Angels, but then I draw a blank). Khanna takes his own world building approach by calling the zombie-like figures who populate his fictional world Ferals. There is a whole set of vocabulary to master in this alternate reality. The protagonist and narrator Ben lives in a time called the Sick, which is in contrast to the time before the Bug, which was call the Clean. The Bug is of course the infectious agent that turns humans into Ferals. A Feral merely has to transfer body fluids to you via an open orifice or wound and you will eventually Fade, which is the term for turning into a Feral. Ferals are creatures not unlike the ones you might have seen out of 28 Days Later, and the only way to survive is pretty much to kill them in a violent way. The killing of Ferals necessarily causes a lot of blood spatter, which is not ideal unless you are lucky enough to be wearing some sort of biohazard suit. Characters seem to primarily spend time salvaging one site or another, looking for food, fuel, or weapons and ammo. The novel opens with Ben leaving behind a science settlement called the Core, but then returning when he realizes that the inhabitants of the Core are under attack by the evil henchman who took over one of the remaining human cities called Gastown. Ben doesn’t arrive in time to get everyone evacuated, manages to lose his ship (called The Cherub) in the process, and ends up stranded on Earth. He is rescued by a good Samaritan, and they eventually team up to go on a foraging mission, but that mission goes bad. The man goes missing, and Ben uses a radio signal to send out some distress signals which might be heard by the boffins, the term used for the scientific crew that Ben had been helping, some of whom were likely also stranded when the Core was overtaken. Fortunately, he is reunited with some of the boffins, including a woman named Miranda, who Ben obviously likes but does not want to admit to liking. Ben joins back up with Miranda, eventually is able to get them situated at another town, all the while allowing Miranda and her scientific comrades the chance to take a live Feral into that town for study. In the meantime, Ben decides he must do whatever he can to get The Cherub back and embarks on a desperate plan to go to Gastown to find out what happened to his airship. Ben must rely upon the help of a man named Diego, who reluctantly agrees to help him, even though Ben’s plan to get Miranda and her science crew into a human settlement ended up causing Diego to fall out of favor with that settlement’s leaders. Indeed, Diego had not known that Miranda and her science crew were harboring a live Feral and thus curried the anger of the settlement’s leaders. Though Ben originally thinks it will only be Diego who will be going with him back to Gastown, Diego’s half-sister Rosie and Miranda both end up going for their own reasons. From this point forward, Khanna amps up the plotting and action elements, as Ben continues with a dangerous plan to stow away in cargo holds and go down to a plant where helium is being produced and where The Cherub actually is being used. Miranda stays in Gastown attempting to research why scientists would be interested in experimenting on Ferals. Whereas Miranda wants a live Feral to find a cure, it becomes apparent that the scientists in Gastown have other, more dastardly agendas. I’ll stop here with the general plot summary, but suffice it to say that there is a lot going on in this novel.

It’s not clear whether or not Falling Sky is a stand-alone novel or will have future installments, but the world that Khanna has built obviously offers much more adventures and issues to sort out. As with many other zombie narratives, the end of the world scenario comes with it highly philosophical issues, especially as related to human ethics and moral order. At various points, there is the question that concerns whether or not the humans are really any better than the simple-minded, but vicious Ferals. It would seem that at many points the most dangerous enemies are other humans rather than the Ferals that populate the planet seeking human flesh. In this sense, Khanna’s novel is not unlike many speculative fictions, which seem to be a way to explore a dystopian alternate reality that is really a refraction of our own dystopian reality in which our we are able to engender such catastrophic modes of social stratification. Khanna’s novel includes non-stop action, so if you’re looking something heavy on explosions, physical combat, zombie-killing, and not-so-fast getaways, then this novel is going to be for you. Interestingly enough, Khanna does insert a measure of ethnic/ religious identities into the text, as we come to discover that Ben is of Jewish descent. Though his background doesn’t really come into play more than a handful of times, this detail is rather interesting given the fact that so often these sorts of protagonists often go entirely unmarked in such ways.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Falling-Sky-RAJAN-KHANNA/dp/1616149825/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1413437100&sr=8-1&keywords=rajan+khanna

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Published on November 05, 2014 17:56

November 1, 2014

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for November 1, 2014

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for November 1, 2014

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide ranging and expansive terrain of Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

In this post reviews of: Raymond M. Wong’s I’m not Chinese: The Journey from Resentment to Reverence (Apprentice House, 2014); Gabrielle Zevin’s Elsewhere (Square Fish, paperback reprint, 2007); Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac (Square Fish, paperback reprint, 2009); All These Things I’ve Done (FSG Young Readers, 2011) and Because it is My Blood (FSG Young Readers, 2012); Gabrielle Zevin’s In the Age of Love and Chocolate (FSG for Young Readers, 2013); Kendare Blake’s Antigoddess (TorTeen, 2013); Kendare Blake’s Mortal Gods (TorTeen, 2014).

A Review of Raymond M. Wong’s I’m not Chinese: The Journey from Resentment to Reverence (Apprentice House, 2014).

Raymond M. Wong’s memoir I’m not Chinese: The Journey from Resentment to Reverence (not to be confused with Raymond K. Wong, author of the Pacific Between) explores a kind of coming-of-age for its author, as he comes to engage his tortured family background, racial identity, and transnational personal history. Wong grows up in a mixed household, with a stepfather named Roger who clearly prefers his biological son over him. Wong’s mother had remarried when she arrived in the states, after having lived an itinerant life. Over the course of the memoir, we discover that she had fled China in the wake of communist rule, subsisted in menial service positions, and then found some measure of economic independence in Hong Kong. She eventually marries the man who would be Wong’s father, but it is unclear why that marriage fails. All we know is that Wong’s mother realizes she must move to the United States when another man she knows threatens her life, and she feels as though she has no other options. The premise of the memoir is Wong’s visit to Hong Kong and then later to China; he is meeting some family relatives and in the process, gaining a better understanding of his place in a larger extended family. He also gets to meet his biological father in that process and as expected, these meetings are sometimes tense, filled with the sense of Wong’s place as a cultural outsider. Indeed, perhaps the most striking thing about this memoir is the fact of constant translation. His mother acts as a translator for him since his Chinese language skills are rudimentary. He must rely on her to translate all things as accurately as possible in order to engage in any of the conversations. Wong’s memoir is not only illuminating for the fact that he begins to reconcile why his family was structured and fractured in the way that it was, but also that he sees why he has come to find his Chinese identity so burdensome. Without this cultural and ethnic context, Wong did not understand some of his mother’s motivations and decisions. This visit to China helps bring him closer to his mother and allows him to give his mother more space in terms of the choices she made, even when they so negatively impacted him. This sort of decentering is of course the very fact of maturity, which is what Wong so effectively shows. As compelling as the memoir can be from that perspective, the memoir is also quite acute in representing China and Hong Kong and the variations of class that appear depending upon what part Wong and her mother are in. Wong has a wonderful eye for description and the travelogue aspect of this memoir is one of its strongest, a narrative conceit that will grab readers of any background. It also dovetails with many of the best memoirs I’ve read that show us the transnational contours of Asian American identity. I’m thinking here of Rahna Rizzuto’s Hiroshima in the Morning and David Mura’s Turning Japanese in which the central Asian American subject must come to negotiate aspects of identity alongside a diasporically-informed self. The title is of course somewhat ironic: Wong is showing us that even with his thorny upbringing and his occasionally willful casting off of his ethnic roots that he can claim a better sense of a transnational context for his life (and his mother’s) while at the same time understanding that he does not necessarily see himself as belonging to China. Indeed, there is a critical moment when Wong observes himself through the eyes of another person, seeing how that person perceives him not as a Chinese individual, but as an American. In this in-between space we know so well as Asian Americanists, Wong’s memoir mines the perilous but creatively fecund space of liminality.

Buy the book here:

http://www.amazon.com/Im-Not-Chinese-Resentment-Reverence-ebook/dp/B00MYRB2TU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412111950&sr=8-1&keywords=raymond+m.+wong

http://www.apprenticehouse.com/about/

A Review of Gabrielle Zevin’s Elsewhere (Square Fish, paperback reprint, 2007); Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac (Square Fish, paperback reprint, 2009); All These Things I’ve Done (FSG Young Readers, 2011) and Because it is My Blood (FSG Young Readers, 2012); Gabrielle Zevin’s In the Age of Love and Chocolate (FSG for Young Readers, 2013).

In Gabrielle Zevin’s debut novel Elsewhere, she takes on the conceit of writing a novel from the third person perspective of someone who has died. Our protagonist is a young teenager named Liz, who at the beginning of the novel, has just succumbed to severe head trauma as a result of a bike accident. Her parents have taken her off life support, and she wakes up in a room of a mysterious boat. Next to her is a stranger named Thandi; the boat is taking them to a place called Elsewhere. As she comes to grips with the fact that she is dead and realizes that Elsewhere seems to be a version afterlife, Liz struggles with leaving behind her former life. In Elsewhere, time moves differently. Everyone in Elsewhere reverses in age from the year they died, until they are at the point of being newborns. They are then relegated to something called the “release,” which is a form of reincarnation. The cycle begins again and again. She spends much of her time in Elsewhere going to a place called Observation Decks, where, for the price of 5 enterims (the currency in Elsewhere; apparently, we’re still in some sort of capitalist system in after we have died), she can observe people she wants from her former life for a select few minutes at a time. Borrowing money from her grandmother, who has taken her in, she continues to view her friends and family, pining away at the thought that they are going on in their lives without her. Liz eventually realizes she must move on; this entails finding something call an avocation, a sort of job for people in the afterlife which involves the person actually doing something he or she likes (imagine that!). Liz becomes a sort of afterlife dog handler and since she finds out she speaks fluent canine, she can help settle newly dead dogs with Elsewhere inhabitants. We discover that dogs have the capacity to communicate in their own complex language systems that can be translated into rough English equivalents. Eventually, Zevin does introduce the romantic interest; a man by the name of Owen Welles, who has reversed in age to the point of being Liz’s contemporary, but who came to Elsewhere as a twenty something firefighter (who was killed in a workplace accident). When the love of Owen’s life eventually makes it to Elsewhere, Zevin introduces the requisite triangle, leaving us to question whether or not Owen and Liz will find a way to be together in the afterlife. Zevin does some interesting world building with Elsewhere, but it requires the reader to suspend a lot disbelief and to quit asking questions. For instance, how does the fact of Earthly population growth factor into Elsewhere’s understanding of the release? At one point, one of the characters discusses a miscarriage, which brings up thorny questions about what counts as life in Elsewhere. If you think too much about the logic of Elsewhere, you may balk at Zevin’s fictional world. In any case, the core conceit is intriguing enough for target readers, who should be willing to cede Elsewhere’s potential logic flaws for the core philosophical and romantic questions that Zevin’s novel engages.

In Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, Gabrielle Zevin’s protagonist and first person narrator is Naomi Porter, who suffers from the titularly referenced retrograde amnesia. While retrieving a camera (due to her duties as a highschool yearbook staff co-editor), she falls and hits her head. She loses most memories from the last four years of her life, while retaining some other skills. For instance, though she can’t remember what has gone on with her parents (they have been divorced), she still can complete all the math and physics homework that she is given. The problem for Naomi is that the retrograde amnesia causes her to rethink her identity. She begins to disidentify from the Naomi of before. That is, she doesn’t understand exactly why she’s so interested in yearbook, why she’s dating the popular jock and tennis player, Ace Zuckerman, or why she’s romantically drawn to the former addict and marginalized classmate named James Larkin, and she seems to be distant with her apparently closest and best friend, William (Will) Landsman. Of course, the sympathies of the reader may be tested to a certain extent. Zevin has created the kind of protagonist that some like to hate: the high school student who has popularity, athletic skill, and intellectual acumen. Yes, Naomi can claim to be a part of multiple social groups and tiers and in the wake of her amnesia, decides to test the boundaries of her fluidity. At one point, she joins the production of the latest play, even though she knows it will eat into her time as the yearbook editor. Then, she decides to break up with Ace Zuckerman, even though it means that her popularity will be likely to take a plunge. To make matters more complicated, she decides to pursue a romance with James Larkin. Tensions in the parental arena add another texture to the novel. Even as Naomi is coming to the grips with the fact that her parents are divorced, she is asked to be the bridesmaid for her father’s upcoming nuptials with his girlfriend Rosa Rivera, a tango dancer who Naomi had never taken a liking to. Naomi also finds her mother’s affair with another man to be enough reason to try to cut off all ties with her. Zevin’s core concept has a nice hook: you’ll want to figure out how Naomi will come to deal with the changes in her identity. Will she be able to reconcile who she has become once her memory begins to return or will she go back to what is most familiar to her? Signs point to the fact that she’ll betray who she once was, and Zevin’s success rests in the very American fantasy that we can all reinvent ourselves to be the better person we’ve always thought we could be. The concluding arc sees a number of interesting romantic shifts that seem unforced and best of all, Zevin leaves us with a surprisingly understated conclusion, one that does not follow the more traditional courtship plots you see in these fictions.

The first installment of Gabrielle Zevin’s All These Things I’ve Done (from the Birthright trilogy, with the most the final book having come out in 2013) follows the teen misadventures of Anya Balanchine, the daughter of a big Mafioso (now dead), who must take care of her mentally challenged older brother Leo and her rambunctious younger sister Natty. Anya’s mother was killed in a mob hit gone bad (a car crash), while her brother received permanent brain injuries in that same event. Anya’s grandmother is confined to her bed and on a respiratorm and Anya has become the de factor guardian of the family. The novel opens with the ending of Anya’s relationship to a fellow high school student named Gable Arsley. Gable pressures Anya into having sex, but she resolutely makes her stand against this act, and this friction ends up terminating their relationship. Anya is a devout Catholic and holds fast to the credo that she will have no sex before marriage. Zevin throws a speculative fiction element into the narrative’s equation by setting the text in a New York City in not too distant, counterfactual future. In Zevin’s version of New York City, chocolate and coffee are banned, crime continues to be a problem, while underground economies have sprung up everywhere to allow people to go on exploring their vices. Anya also happens to come from a family that once was one of the big makers of chocolate. Living in the shadow of this mob family, Anya attempts to encourage her family members to steer clear of any remaining mob ties. But once Anya’s former boyfriend is poisoned by a bar of contraband chocolate, and Anya is pinned for Gable’s health-fragile state, it becomes clear that something is amiss in the chocolate industry. Though Anya does not want any part of the underground economies her extended family still engages, she must consider whether or not to take up her birthright, especially since it was her father who once ran the family’s major businesses, including chocolate production. Zevin knows her genre and the other issue is the one of romance. Anya is falling in love with a fellow student Win Delacroix, whose father is an assistant DA. Win’s father doesn’t want Anya to have anything to do with Win, especially since Anya is the subject of much tabloid speculation and has connections to illegal activities. Fearing that Anya and Win’s relationship will pollute his chance for career advancement, Win’s father attempts to end that relationship. Fans of the paranormal romance/ young adult fiction might be a bit disappointed in Zevin’s counterfactual world. The banning of certain items such as chocolate and coffee, while intriguing on some levels, doesn’t necessarily bring much gravitas to this alternate reality. One wonders whether or not this element was necessarily required to create the story that Zevin seems most interested in: Anya’s attempt to deal with her family’s problematic professional history (rather than anything really all that imaginary or speculative in construct). Nevertheless, YA fans will still find some modes to engage this series, especially through the central romance plot and the expectation that the second installment might offer more of this not fully fleshed out alternate reality.

In Because it is My Blood, Zevin cranks up the body count and increases the danger factor as Anya gets further embroiled in the family business. The opening sees her leaving the Liberty Detention Facility, a youths-only program meant to be a version of “young adult” prison time. She has promised not to date Win Delacroix, but seeing him with another school classmate makes things difficult. The early part of the novel sees Anya trying to find a school willing to take her, given her rap sheet and her mob family connections. At the last minute, her former high school receives a sizable donation with the stipulation that they take her back. Anya eagerly agrees, but her return is short-lived: someone snaps a photo of her holding hands with Win Delacroix (it only happened for a second), but the damage is done, and they are perceived to be a couple. This kind of public relations issue is anathema to Win’s father, who is now running for District Attorney. To avoid bad PR, he finds a way to get Anya back into Liberty, effectively sending her back to youth prison. Anya knows she can’t stay there again, so using her family’s lawyers and associates (an aging Mr. Kipling who handles the family’s financial trust as well as his assistant Simon Green), she is able to make an escape and goes to Mexico, where she stays with a relative of an in-law named Sophie Bitter. The family in Mexico allows Anya the chance to appreciate cacao cultivation, while at the same time giving her a chance to lay low. She makes a quick friendship with a young man named Theo, but when she becomes the target of an assassination, she realizes that she must come back to the United States to deal with the continuing business problems plaguing her family. It becomes evident in this second book that Anya must make a choice about how to participate in her family’s chocolate business. Balanchine Chocolate still retains a large market share, but other companies are banging on the door, trying to find out a wave to carve out a larger part of the profits. Anya as well as her immediate family members are seen as a huge liability to many parties because she, her sister, and older brother Leo all retain symbolic power as children of the former business owner and CEO. I thought Zevin’s follow-up was far superior, especially in its exploration of the agricultural aspect of the business company, which gave this book a sense of realism that seemed absent in the previous one. Again, the conceit of banned chocolate (and other such sundries) comes off as a little bit hard to believe (especially since it seems as though chocolate is really an analogue for pot), but it fits well with the young adult target readership obviously, so it is appropriate in that regard. Obviously, this narrative is also far more embedded in issues of cultural and racial difference, especially when Anya must travel to Mexico. The largely deracinated world of the first book cannot be maintained in the second, as Anya’s travels make apparent the transnational nature of the chocolate trade and the way in which labor is extracted in other countries to round out corporate trajectories. I look forward to the third book!

Buy the Books Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Memoirs-Teenage-Amnesiac-Gabrielle-Zevin/dp/0312561288/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1411488066&sr=8-8&keywords=gabrielle+zevin

http://www.amazon.com/All-These-Things-Done-Birthright/dp/B008W31OF2/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1&qid=1411163157

http://www.amazon.com/Because-Blood-Birthright-Gabrielle-Zevin/dp/B00C80LGXK/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1411322412&sr=8-6&keywords=gabrielle+zevin

A Review of Gabrielle Zevin’s In the Age of Love and Chocolate (FSG for Young Readers, 2013).

In the Age of Love and Chocolate is the conclusion to Gabrielle Zevin’s birthright trilogy, which has been following the (mis)adventures of Anya Balanchine, the daughter of chocolate contraband mafiosos, who now has started her own business: a set of clubs catering to cacao lovers. Cacao is not exactly chocolate, which is how Anya is able to get these clubs going in a legitimate fashion. With the help of Charles Delacroix, a lawyer and the father of Anya’s former flame, Anya is able to open these clubs to great success, while also employing many key family members and friends in that process (this long list includes her best friend, Scarlet, who is a new mother; her older brother Leo and Leo’s wife Noriko; her cacao supplier and later her live-in sort of boyfriend Theobrama). Though Anya clearly still carries a torch for Win, he’s moved on to a new girlfriend and is living in Boston. Even when a recent meeting at a club opening allows them to catch up, their conversation is best described as icy and tense. Natty, Anya’s younger sister, has increasingly been getting into trouble. Her most recent summer at “genius camp” has resulted in expulsion. She, although only fourteen, has been carrying on with a nineteen year old boy named Pierce and in order to protect her, Anya sends Natty off (much to her opposition of course) to a distant boarding school. Things seem to go well for a time, even with the tension that flares up when Theo proposes to Anya over Christmas vacay and Anya declines, stating that she doesn’t believe in marriage. Who could blame her, considering both her parents are dead? In any case, when Theo, Anya and Natty return to the States from their time in Mexico, Anya discovers that Fats, the de factor head of Balanchine Chocolates, has been murdered. Gasp What now? Anya’s eventual plan involves none other than Yuji Ono, the head of the Japanese branch of one of the top five chocolate bar producing companies. Yuji is dying, and he proposes marrying Anya as a bid to strengthening both empires and shutting out others who seem to be trying to horn in and to monopolize the chocolate bar market. Yuji’s ex, Sophia Bitter (head of the German branch of one of the top five chocolate producing companies), has poisoned Yuji in retaliation for a perceived betrayal that occurred in book two, so Yuji’s plan is a literal last gasp-attempt to cement some power before he goes the way of the dinosaur. This gambit proves to have lasting and catastrophic effects, the likes of which move the novel into its final sequence (called The Age of Love). This sequence I have to say—from my humble opinion—is probably the trilogy’s weakest. Yes, we know that the romance plot must have some sort of resolution, but the most obvious romantic combination is one that seems never in danger of ever being diverted (ultimately), so we can say that the novel ends with few surprises. Over the course of three novels, I have come to enjoy Anya’s increasingly snarky personality. She’s become a bit of a sarcastic, edgy and witty protagonist, and there were points in this novel that genuinely made me crack up laughing. This spunky aspect of her character was something that I missed in the initial edition of the series, but over the course of her many trials and tribulations, Anya has become hardened and with it a kind of steely comic exterior that makes for a fun reading experience. This change in her character is perhaps why I found the ending a little bit of a letdown, but the trilogy does get stronger as a whole over the arc. It’s far from a paranormal romance and the conceit of the futuristic world is perhaps the weakest structural element considering that the only thing that really makes it seem as if we’re anywhere in a different temporal moment is the banning of things like chocolate and coffee. Nevertheless, as I’ve intimated in previous reviews of earlier installments, fans of this young adult genre will find much to enjoy in the conclusion to the Birthright Trilogy.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/In-Age-Love-Chocolate-Birthright/dp/0374380759/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412478731&sr=8-1&keywords=in+the+age+of+love+and+chocolate

A Review of Kendare Blake’s Antigoddess (TorTeen, 2013).

The gods are dying and so begins the premise of Kendare Blake’s fourth novel Antigoddess, the start of a new series (after the ghoulishly entertaining ghost hunter duology of Girl of Nightmares and Anna Dressed in Blood and Sleepwalk Society). Not only are the gods dying, but they realize that there may be a chance to halt the process, but this may involve battling each other in order to find the key to retaining their once-hallowed immortality. In Blake’s version of events, the Greek Gods and other associated heroic entities (like Cassandra and Odysseus) have merely found other bodies and other lives to inhabit in what is not unlike our own present day. They regularly use words like any other teenager or young adult, while also proclaiming their once revered status as mighty beings who could command armies and destroy civilizations. Once battles lines are effectively drawn, the novel starts to gain a little bit more traction. Here, we see that Athena and Hermes will be fighting against Hera, Aphrodite, and Poseidon. Early on in the novel, Athena and Hermes get a little bit of help from Demeter, who sends them on to find Cassandra, the ill-fated phrophetess, who may hold the key to their divine salvation. They enlist the spiritual powers of the descendants of Circe, a group of witches, who in the present day have become—what else—but a high society escort company. Once Hera gets wind of the fact that these witches have sided with Athena and Hermes, all hell breaks loose and most of the witches are killed. It is clear then not everyone will survive. The narrative is bifurcated in the first half with a slower plot concerning Cassandra, in her present-day manifestation, and her friendships with a group of high-school students, including a teenager named Aidan. Aidan is actually Apollo and has, for the most part, eschewed his divine background to masquerade in what is more or less a normal teenager’s life, which is defined in this novel as parties, girls, and high school. Cassandra’s brother is Henry, who doesn’t realize he is Hector, while Cassandra’s friend is Andie, who doesn’t realize she’s Andromache (Hector’s wife). While the premise of Blake’s new series is highly intriguing, this novel is largely a set up for what is going to follow. There is one climactic battle sequence at the end, but the momentum shifts to get this point make this initial installment uneven. The mixture of the present-day tweenspeak with Greek god mythology can come off unintentionally funny (at least from my perspective). Though I may be coming off as curmudgeonly, the thing to remember is that Blake obviously knows her young adult paranormal romance genre: we have an ordinary heroine who is really not so ordinary (Cassandra), who engages in a romance plot with a man who probably isn’t really right for her (Aidan), while realizing that she must defeat some big bad, great evil, or force that is going to end up in the ruin of practically all of humanity (Hera and others). In this respect, Blake does not disappoint and we’ll look to the next installment to see how the battle lines continue to be drawn.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Antigoddess-The-Goddess-Kendare-Blake/dp/0765334461/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410448949&sr=8-1&keywords=antigoddess

A Review of Kendare Blake’s Mortal Gods (TorTeen 2014).

Kendare Blake follows up Antigoddess with Mortal Gods. In this uneven, fitful second installment, Cassandra continues to learn more about her powers, while Athena continues to plan for the all out battle that will occur between the gods, demigods, and mythic heroes of ancient Greece now reincarnated in the present day. Athena is looking to find Artemis as well as the other legendary “weapon” that can be used to destroy other gods. This first weapon, as we know from the first installment, is none other than Cassandra herself, with the ability to somehow channel energy that destroys gods. Achilles is the second weapon, and Odysseus finally fesses up that he knows where Achilles is hiding out, somewhere in the Australian outback. So, there are two retrieval quests, one for Artemis and the other for Achilles. Hermes’s and Odysseus’s trip to find Artemis (in the jungles of Malaysia) is all for naught, as Artemis has already been killed. Athena’s quest to find Achilles is more fruitful, as he is located in the Australian wilds. Meanwhile, Ares is being recruited by Aphrodite and Hera to work against Athena and her allies. Hera, who had seemingly been turned to stone at the end of book 1, is partially healed by the mythic three fates, who themselves are also dying. Ares occasionally dispatches four wolves to track down and to trouble the lives of Athena and her acolytes, so much so that Andie is almost mortally wounded. Fortunately for her, Calypso, Odysseus’s former lover comes to the rescue, lulling the wolves to sleep with her vocal powers. Thus, the battle lines are drawn. Athena, Hermes, Cassandra, Henry (Hector), Andie (Andromache), Achilles and Calypso against Hera, Aphrodite, and Ares. Though it seems as if the cards are stacked in favor of Athena, the support of the Three Fates is indeed suggestive of the doom that may befall Athena and her ragged band of heroes. I wanted to really like this novel, but I had trouble getting through it. Part of the problem I think stems from the fact that there is so much plot left to the bickering between characters about what to do and how to go about doing it. Also, much of the novel seems to be a set-up for the third act, and though the final battle of book two is definitely appreciated, the payoff may not be enough for readers who endured through the prior narrative trajectory. Blake also struggles to toggle from one narrative perspective to the next, which makes me yearn for the first person perspective she used so effectively in the Girl of Nightmares series. To be sure, the conceit of this trilogy—one based upon a resurrection and reappearance of the Greek gods in modern times is an innovative one—and fans of the young adult genre will of course still find something of interest in this installment.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Mortal-Gods-The-Goddess-War/dp/0765334445

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Published on November 01, 2014 10:12

October 23, 2014

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for October 23, 2014

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for October 23, 2014

Today’s post is focused on Penguin and associated Imprints. For academics and instructors who are readers of these reviews, do recall that Penguin has a wonderful academic services division, with the best exam copy policy of the major publishers, which have allowed me to make new additions to my syllabi with ease.

http://www.penguin.com/services-academic/

http://www.penguin.com/services-academic/cfis/

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide ranging and expansive terrain of Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

A Review of Marie Lu’s Legend (Putnam Juvenile, 2011).

For fans of the post-apocalyptic genre, Marie Lu’s Legend won’t necessarily offer anything radically new, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it: with an intriguing premise, a crackling plot, and dynamic characters, you’ll sail through it hoping that there will be other installments. Indeed, as soon as I finished it, I immediately scrambled over to amazon to see if there was an impending publication (and indeed, there are two in the reviews that follow). Lu’s Legend does set us up quite well for more books and follows in the young adult genre that has become a mainstay of Hollywood adaptations (think Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy which has now gone global with its popular film starring Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson). The premise is roughly this: June is a military prodigy for the Republic, a postnation constructed in the ruins of conflicts and plagues (the Republic’s main postnational rival is the Colonies). When her brother Metias is killed, presumably by a dangerous threat to the Republic’s postnational security, she is hired to track this guy down. This guy (named Day) is June’s exact counterpart, a fiercely intelligent and tactical young man who is simply trying to help his family survive the plague that is threatening their ghetto existence. Most of Day’s family (for reasons that can only be revealed if you read the novel) does not even know he is alive, but when Day’s youngest sibling, Eden, is stricken with the plague and a strange symbol carved onto the door of the family home to denote the family’s outcast status, Day springs into action to try to find a vaccine, or at least medication that will help suppress the worst symptoms from the illness. June, for her part, begins the novel as a strident supporter of the Republic, the side of good as she would like to think, but as the narrative proceeds, it is clear that the Republic has some secrets of its own. At one point, a character named Kaede comes into the picture and for fans of Malinda Lo, you immediately scramble to see if there is any connection to Lo’s Huntress. In the acknowledgments you discover that Lu herself is part of a writerly community that connects her with other YA talent like Malinda Lo and Cindy Pon (Phoenix series).

A Review of Marie Lu’s Prodigy (Putnam Juvenile, 2013) and Champion (Putnam Juvenile, 2013).

There are certain to be spoilers in this review.

In the lead-up to what is certainly to be a disastrous MLA paper, I continue to read deeply within the ever-expansive world of YA fiction, especially those written by so called American writers of Asian descent. I fell behind in Marie Lu’s postapocalyptic paranormal romance/ urban fantasy plague (did I miss anything else) Legend series. Her second and third books are reviewed here: Prodigy and Champion. In Prodigy, Lu takes us into the desperate plans that Day and June attempt in order to take down the Republic. At this point, they have teamed up with an insurgent group known as the Patriots, which include a number of intriguing and roguish characters, such as Kaede, Razor, Baxter, and of course, Tess, Day’s long-suffering companion. Day and June are split up in a scheme that will involve assassinating the new Elector, the young and handsome Anden. June must turn herself in, get the trust of the Elector, then help enable the Patriots to carry out the assassination. Day stays on the outside, viewing the proceedings that will lead up to the actual assassination attempt. Lu complicates her fictional world by suggesting in this second part that the Republic may not be as evil as originally thought. Indeed, Anden may or may not be an improvement over his father, gesturing to the possibility that the Republic can change, perhaps even reformulate the class barriers that have resulted in considerable resource and social inequality. June is increasingly convinced then that Anden may be something other than a cruel and capricious dictator. Since she is in deep cover, it becomes apparent that it will be extremely difficult for her to attempt to signal to abort the original plans to assassinate Anden. The climactic sequence of course involves the botched assassination attempt. In the aftermath, Day and June find themselves in the Colonies, trying to figure out what their next move will be. The conclusion sees Day and June realizing that the Patriots may not be uniformly behind one group and Day and June work with Kaede to return to the Republic in order to foment support behind Anden. Day, though wary, is finally convinced because it is Anden who orders the release of Day’s brother, Eden, the plague-infected bioweapon. Lu’s second book convincingly expands this postapocalyptic America by giving us a view into the Republics direct rival: the Colonies, which seem to be some sort of Orwellian society formulated around corporate citizenship. Lu adds more tension by creating simultaneous love triangles. While June and Day’s chemistry cannot be ignored: Tess emerges as June’s main competition, while Anden serves as Day’s potential romantic rival.

At the conclusion of Prodigy, we see that June has decided to take on a position as Princeps-Elect, which would give her an incredibly powerful position within the Republic, second only to the Elector. Day, we find out, has some sort of degenerative condition, which will soon result in his death. The conclusion sees Day convince June to take the position, certainly in part spurred by his new diagnosis, which he of course does not tell June. It is his way of severing their bond, which is clear at the beginning of the third installment in the series. Lu shifts the political action to the growing tension between the Colonies and the Republic. It is apparent that the plague that had originally been an issue within the Republic has now expanded to the Colonies, and the Colonies have issued an ultimatum: if you cannot provide us with a cure, we are going to destroy you. The Republic’s only chance is to use Eden as a potential research specimen to create a cure, but of course, Day is in the way. Anden uses June to attempt to convince Day to allow Eden to be used for scientific research, but given everything that happened in the first two books, you can entirely understand why he would be so resistant. Further still, he himself continues on his precipitous downward arc of healthfulness, such that he is given a diagnosis of only about two months to live. Then, the offensive begins and the Republic finds itself in the unenviable position of asking for help from the Antarcticans, which will require the Elector to cede some serious territory to them. At the same time, Eden pushes back against Day and decides that he will allow himself to be experimented on, if it will allow the Republic to find a cure to the plague that the Colonies believe was constructed and deployed by them. As the novel hurtles toward its finish, Day hatches a desperate plan that will require the Republic to pretend that it has surrendered; will the Republic survive? Will Day and June finally be able to express their deep feelings for each other? These questions and more will be answered by what seems to be the conclusion to the Legend series. My one big gripe about this book was the epilogue, which seemed to consolidate too much time into a small frame. Lu felt the need to summarize a good 9 years or so before the crucial final scene, but these periods feel far too rushed, especially with respect to the other romance that blooms during this period.

As with many other YA paranormal romances I’ve been wondering about the place of race within these narratives; it seems as though the postapocalyptic world is completely deracinated. Social inequality seems most apparent in class difference. Interestingly enough, Day himself is part Chinese, but the aspect of mixed race seems to be a red herring. Overall, Lu’s trilogy is a jam-packed, explosive action-thriller with the requisite romance plot. Fans of YA, The Hunger Games, Divergent, and other such works should be more than fulfilled by this trilogy.

A Review of Marie Lu’s The Young Elites (Putnam Juvenile, 2014).

I adored this new YA fiction by Marie Lu for a lot of reasons: our heroine is not necessarily a heroine. In fact, she might be a villain. Second, the romance plot in this novel is catastrophically terminated. Third, the conclusion doesn’t exactly make clear where the second in the series is going to go exactly, especially when a new character and a new narrative perspective are introduced in an epilogue. Finally, I grew up reading X-Men comics, so any novel in which young teens have super powers is going to resonate with me. In the Young Elites, set in the Medieval period, our protagonist is Adelina Amouteru (with most of the novel being narrated from her perspective in the first person). She has survived the blood fever (Lu’s obvious take on the bubonic plague) though it caused her to lose and eye and changed her physical appearance. Her own sister Violetta also survived the blood fever, but their mother died. In the wake of the blood fever, their father has turned into a raging and violent alcoholic. Adelina is on the verge of womanhood (almost seventeen), when she is sold to a man as basically his concubine, for apparently no man would actually want to marry such a scarred individual (though Adelina is still beautiful otherwise). Adelina attempts to run away, but in that process her father apprehends her. She ends up killing him when strange powers manifest that allow her to create illusions. She basically scares her father to death. Adelina is then charged with her father’s murder, but when she is to be executed she is saved by a man known as the Reaper, who has the power to create and to generate fires. The Reaper, otherwise known as Enzo Valenciano, is the leader of the Dagger Society, who are a branch of the Young Elites, those who have manifested powers in the wake of the blood fever. The Young Elites are also known by another epithet: malfetto, which is the term for a kind of mutant figure that is denigrated by society at large. At that time there are about five young elites along with Enzo, who all have various powers of their own. These are: Raffaele, otherwise known as The Messenger; a young and extremely beautiful man with the power of sensing other young elite; Dante, otherwise known as The Spider, a young elite with super strength and combat abilities; Gemma, otherwise known as The Star Thief, a young elite with power over animals; Windtalker; and then the Architect, who is able to rebuild things in one substance and recreate them in another. Enzo saves Adelina because he realizes her powers might be useful for their missions. Raffaele is more than a little bit worried about Adelina because a particular test meant to show how a young elite aligns in terms of particular emotions and ethics reveals that Adelina has dark side that may prove to be the undoing of the Daggers if they employ her. But even as Adelina begins to acclimate as a potential new recruit for the Daggers, who together seek to usurp the current ruling court, she is approached by Teren Santoro, a brutal Inquisitor, who is blackmailing her into revealing information about the Daggers. Indeed, Adelina must tell Teren all that she knows in order to keep her sister Violetta alive. Thus, Adelina is forced to become a spy, while cultivating her powers of illusion. For his part, Teren is in love with the ruling queen, a woman named Giuletta, who believes that she should hold sole power over the crown and thus plots with Teren to kill the king, otherwise known as her husband. Will Adelina be able to tell the elites that she is being blackmailed? Will she work for Teren in order to save her sister’s life? All of these questions can be answered by reading the novel and I very much look forward to the second installment (which I hope is a trilogy, but such information has not yet been released).

A Review of Eleanor Glewwe’s Sparkers (Viking, 2014).

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Eleanor Glewwe’s debut novel Sparkers is part of the ever-growing archive of young adult fiction penned by American writers of Asian descent. Glewwe constructs a particularly ambitious and original world based upon a caste system dividing those who live in the Ashari city-state: there are those with magical abilities (the kasir) and those who do not have those magical abilities (the halani). The halani are considered to be of a lower class, though they do have some paranormal capabilities. Indeed, most are able to sense occasionally a future event in some vague way, something called “intuition” in the novel. The larger world of the novel is made up of city-states; only one other is prominently featured (called Xanite), though it is clear that the kasir and the halani can migrate to other city-states. There is a family in the novel who is of kasir background but hail from Xanite and are thus treated a little bit differently than the other elite kasir. The narrator and protagonist of this story is the teenage Marah Levi, who is of halani background, and who misses a key exam that causes her to have to scramble to find an alternative means of getting secondary schooling in her specialty: the violin. Around the time that Marah is given a second chance by auditioning with a Xanite-founded performance arts school, a plague begins to erupt around the city-state. Individuals are coming down with a deadly respiratory illness that turns the eyes of those afflicted into darkened black circles. The plague is affecting kasir and halani alike and the government, which is ruled in a seven-person based oligarchy, hasn’t seemed to make any headway on finding the cure. Marah also happens to have an interest in languages, which allows her to strike up a friendship across class lines. After befriending a young girl of kasir background, she is eventually invited over to the girl’s house. Once there, Marah bumps into the girl’s brother Azariah, who happens to be a collector of rare books. Marah realizes that Azariah has a book written in a banned language called Hagramet; Marah has a grammar book for the Hagramet language and is thus able to translate some of the passages in Azariah’s book. Over the course of Marah’s visiting Azariah’s little sister, it becomes clear that the Hagramet book might actually have a cure for the plague. Their quest becomes urgent when both Marah’s little brother (Caleb) and Azariah’s little sister (Sarah) come down with the disease. Also, Marah’s best friend from school Leah has also come down with the sickness. Marah and Azariah must work together to translate the book, figure out the process by which the spells must be cast and the reagents collected and cooked in order to create the cure, but there are eyes all over the city-state. And it soon becomes evident that a larger conspiracy is brewing: not everyone wants the cure to be offered to the citizens of the city-state. Thus, the novel becomes a race against time: will Marah and Azariah be able to make the cure before Caleb, Leah, Sarah, and other citizens of the city succumb or will they be thwarted by powers beyond their control?

Glewwe’s debut is truly inventive, one of the first I’ve seen that so effectively creates an entirely different world-system and doesn’t rely on popular short hands of mythical creature-lore (like vampire fictions). Of course, one can’t help but read the novel through its many allegories: the tensions between the halani and the kasir obviously becoming an analogue for any kind of rifts that occur over social difference. Additionally, Glewwe’s novel is as much about class as it might be about race. Access to important medical advances and techniques seemed reserved only for the kasir, so when the plague affects both the halani and kasir equally, there’s a question as to how any cure would be distributed to the masses. Given the continuing international tensions brewing right now over the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone and Liberia (and other parts of West Africa), plague narratives have a particularly charged focus that bring to mind questions of medical ethics in times of great stress and tragedy. If governments, pharmaceutical companies, and the medical care industries acted with as much compassion as the two major characters in this novel, we truly would have nothing to worry about.

Buy the Books Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Sparkers-Eleanor-Glewwe/dp/0451468767/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1411792173&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/The-Young-Elites-Marie-Lu/dp/0399167838/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412692527&sr=8-1&keywords=the+young+elites

http://www.amazon.com/Legend-Marie-Lu/dp/014242207X

http://www.amazon.com/Prodigy-Legend-Novel-Marie-Lu/dp/0399256768/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1384971220&sr=1-3&keywords=marie+lu

http://www.amazon.com/Champion-Legend-Marie-Lu/dp/0399256776/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1384971288&sr=1-1&keywords=marie+lu

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Published on October 23, 2014 15:31

October 5, 2014

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for October 5 2014

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for October 5 2014

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide ranging and expansive terrain of Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

In this post, reviews of Wendy Law-Yone’s The Road To Wanting (Chatto & Windus, 2010); Tosca Lee’s The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen (Howard Books, 2014); Sandeep Jauhar’s Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2014); Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors (St. Martin’s Press, 2014); Kat Zhang’s Echoes of Us (Harper, 2014); Sherry Thomas’s The Perilous Sea (Balzer + Bray, 2014).

A Review of Wendy Law-Yone’s The Road To Wanting (Chatto & Windus, 2010)

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Though Wendy Law-Yone’s third novel The Road To Wanting (longlisted for the UK’s prestigious Orange Prize) has yet to come out stateside, occasionally there are surreptitious ways of getting one’s hands on a review copy (*grins*). Law-Yone’s The Road to Wanting is long awaited for most fans of Asian American literature, as her first two critically acclaimed works have for the most part held a very distinguished place in the canon for the fact that there are so few fictional representations of Burmese transnational contexts. Fortunately, The Road to Wanting continues Law-Yone’s incisive and unsentimentalized depictions of social issues that have arisen in Burma (and follows the trajectory of her first two novels in this way), especially in light of the country’s military governance, clan tensions (the ethnographic detail is an important element of this novel), and economic instabilities. Law-Yone’s narrator is Na Ga, a placeholder name for a girl from the Wild Lu clan. As a young child, she is sold off to another family, then sold again and again in different contexts and situations. At the core of Law-Yone’s work then is the plight of human trafficking. The novel is anachronically constructed. The opening of the novel sees the narrator in a border town between China and Burma; she’s languishing in a hotel, waiting for the right time to cross into Burma through the help of a guide named Mr. Jiang. But Na Ga doesn’t want to go back and she plans to kill herself (her noose is ready to go), only having to discover that someone else has beat her to the punch. Indeed, she discovers that Mr. Jiang has already killed himself. This moment gives her pause to think about her actions and of course to reflect upon her life to that point, which is told in retrospectives throughout the novel. We come to understand that she’s at the border because her American sponsor, Will, has effectively cast her out from his home (in Thailand), and he’s encouraged her and financed her way back into Burma. She’s more than reluctant to go of course; her time with Will was not unlike an idyllic period she had as a child when she was fortuitously taken in by an American couple who had settled for a time in Rangoon. The “road to Wanting” is a title meant to invoke Na Ga’s terrifying and unpredictable journey to this border town, but Law-Yone is obviously playing off the idea of “wanting” as lack. Na Ga, who has survived so much, does not have any biological kin to come back to in Burma, so the question becomes: what purpose does it serve to go back to Burma? This question is a larger and perhaps more metaphorical one being posed by Law-Yone, who understands that going back to a “home” country does not necessarily come with it feelings of comfort or nostalgia. Indeed, as Na Ga makes her way to the border, she understands exilic trajectories come in many and often disastrous forms. For Na Ga, exit from Burma comes at the price of her sexual freedom. Indeed, we discover through flashbacks that, having been left behind by the American couple and moved to a smaller city in Burma (alongside the servant who originally took her in and brought her to that American couple), she comes to realize that she wants a different life. At 16, fixers come to town looking for young women who would then be brought back to major cities as factory workers, but as we learn, these fixers are really human traffickers and Na Ga is essentially sold as a sex slave and transferred to Thailand. Thus, when Will, an American, sponsors Na Ga through what is probably an NGO type organization (in the wake of her brothel being raided and closed), she believes she may have found the start to a better life. But Law-Yone understands her protagonist well; Na Ga is fearful that Will’s companionship is transitory and constantly looks for signs that he is tiring of her. Eventually he does, which leaves her in the border town with no money and a ticket into Burma, the very land in which her own father originally sold her as a young child to pay for debts. What can Burma hold, the novel asks? But Law-Yone does offer a sliver of possibility. As Na Ga comes to understand, her connections in the border town are deeper than she realizes, and the political textures of the novel become enriched by an unexpected and deeply moving concluding sequence. The ending is far from optimistic but leaves our protagonist with more than one to thing to live for and a sense of purpose that perhaps portends a more agential future life. There was an approximately 15 year gap between this novel and her last, so we’ll hope that we won’t have to wait as long for the next!

More about the Book Here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E49Wt0Ldkg

A Review of Tosca Lee’s The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen (Howard Books, 2014).

I’m trying this new thing of reading three or four books at once, being in different stages of each and generally seeing if this approach helps unexpected relationalities to spark. Tosca Lee’s follow-up to Iscariot (reviewed here on Asian American Literature Fans) is The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen. Prior to opening the book, I did not know much about Sheba and did my requisite Wikipedia-esque level internet research. Lee picked a very intriguing historical figure and one particularly malleable to her preferred mode of storytelling, which are fictional reconstructions of actual individuals (most often with a Biblical foundation). In the case of Sheba, there is no definitive narrative concerning her life, and scholars often debate the location of her kingdom (in what is modern day Yemen or Ethiopia, for instance) as well as the power of her hold on the crown. Lee’s depiction begins with Bilqis (one of the versions of Sheba’s name) living under the royal eye of her father, but once her mother dies, her father takes a new wife. This new wife does not seem to care much for Bilqis and attempts to marry her off soon enough, but Bilqis’s new husband is soon killed during a flood. Bilqis requests to leave at that point, hoping to start a new life somewhere else, beyond the watchful gaze of her stepmother. But once her father’s health takes a turn for the worse, and it becomes apparent that her stepmother has used her association to the king to secure as much power for herself and her relatives/ tribal connections, Bilqis is called upon to unite the groups/ clans opposed to the stepmother. Bilqis triumphs and so begins her reign as queen of Saba. Once in the palace as queen, her position as a female monarch is often unstable. Should she marry in order to provide an heir? What kind of relationship will she hold with other men who are her advisors? How will she be able to lead and unite a people who had subsisted under turmoil and civil conflict? And then there’s the issue of King Solomon who has just come to power and who is threatening Saba’s trade routes. Bilqis must operate with diplomacy and gamesmanship in mind as she tries to figure out why King Solomon so obstinately wishes to have her come to visit and offer tribute to him. Bilqis, understanding that the future of her reign is at stake, spends a considerable amount of time figuring out what the best possible decision will be. Eventually, she decides she must make the arduous (many months long) journey to see King Solomon and try to put an end to their stalemate. Once in Solomon’s kingdom, Bilqis is confused by a perceived ambivalence by Solomon and must once again try to divine what it is she must do in order to curry the proper amount of favor without having to relinquish any major power she already holds. As with Iscariot, Lee had to complete some considerable research, not only evident in the narrative itself, that emerges in very interesting author’s note which concludes the book. Much of the knowledge concerning the Queen of Saba (or Sheba) is lacking, so Lee does have some room to create her own spin on her tale in which a potential romance between Solomon and Bilqis is perhaps the boldest move she makes in her configuration of the story. Of course, the whole issue of a female monarch is absolutely foundational to Lee’s version, and Lee’s take on this story does cast a very politically invested light in the issue of gender and power. Bilqis, for instance, must continually deal with any sort of rumor that suggests that she might be consorting with a man who is not an appropriate match for her. Bilqis is well aware of the double standard being levied against her at these times, and thus the novel is in some respects especially germane to the continued conservative norms that often divide women and men in issues related to governance and leadership. Lee chooses an intriguing story to flesh out and readers of Biblical themes and Oriental tales will find much to adore in Lee’s latest religiously grounded offering.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Legend-Sheba-Rise-Queen/dp/1451684045/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412179067&sr=8-1&keywords=queen+of+sheba+rise+of+a+queen

A Review of Sandeep Jauhar’s Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2014)

For those with some knowledge of the healthcare system, Sandeep Jauhar’s Doctored—part memoir, part sociological/ journalistic treatise—may not necessarily provide much new formation. Indeed, this work follows within the established concerns of the managed care approach that has left both medical care personnel and their patients struggling. Doctors are getting paid less than ever before, have less control than ever before, while having to squeeze in patients in a time schedule where they have little chance to establish the kind of rapport they would prefer. But what makes this work rise above is of course Jauhar’s personal insights and experiences, especially related to moments during which his own family must engage with the medical care system. The birth of a son, for instance, creates some tension as he and his wife must negotiate whether or not to deal with a tricky Caesarean section. Jauhar further realizes that the kind of life he wants to lead with his family is ultimately incommensurate with the urban lifestyle that he has for so long idealized. Indeed, one day he understands that Manhattan is not for him. A moment where he tries to cross a large street filled with traffic just to find a shortcut to a tennis court proves to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Along the way out to the surburbs, Jauhar realizes that he can neither be a mercenary nor can be he an unrealistic dreamer believing in his ability to change the system one patient at a time. The sobering reality Jauhar comes to understand is that there will be no one answer to changing the system and in the meantime, all that he and other doctors can do is maintain their commitment to the patient’s health and work within the constraints of a flawed healthcare structure. As Jauhar writes near the conclusion: “People often think of doctors as either consumedly avaricious or impossibly altruistic. There is a disconnect between how the lay world views medicine and how doctors experience it from the inside” (258). Indeed, Jauhar effectively shows that it is impossible to stay at either pole and that the doctor, at the end of the day, must find some way to exert some choice in the roles that he or she will play. Jauhar makes his choice: “It’s the tender moments helping people in need. In the end, medicine is about taking care of people in their most vulnerable state and making yourself a bit in the same in the process” (260). We can only hope that the next generation of doctors stick by a similar credo and help transform the system, bit by bit, over the course of the long haul.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Doctored-The-Disillusionment-American-Physician/dp/0374141398/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410566993&sr=8-1&keywords=Sandeep+Jauhar

A Review of Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors (St. Martin’s Press, 2014).

Like Bilal Tanweer’s The Scatter Here is Too Great, Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors was one of the finalists for the Man Booker Literary Prize, but that was in 2012 and Munaweera’s novel was not published until just this summer in the United States. And thank the literary gods it finally has dropped stateside! Munaweera’s debut explores the intricate and thorny politics of Sri Lankan family building in the era of tensions between the Tamils and the Sinhala. It has much in common with the larger corpus of works and writers who have mined this territory, including Roma Tearne’s The Mosquito, Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, V.V. Ganeshenanthan’s Love Marriage, and Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy. The novel is told from the perspective of Yasodhara, but the novel starts with an interesting conceit in that Yasodhara takes the time to narrate how her parents’ marriage comes to be, thus imitating a sort of third person limited omniscient storyteller. Her father and mother come from separate parts of the island. Her father is raised by a domineering mother who hopes that he will amount to something great, and she plans to marry him off to someone of great standing. Her mother Visaka is also raised by a strong mother figure. Visaka at first falls in love with a Sinhala boarder, living with her family in the wake of her father’s death and the fact of the family’s bankruptcy, but she will later be married off to Yasodhara’s father. But, we know given the ethnoracial divisions plaguing the Tamils and the Sinhala that the novel will soon move into a darker direction. Yasodhara is born on the same day as Shiva; Shiva’s mother is none other than the woman who would marry Visaka’s first love, the Sinhala man who lives upstairs. Because they go into labor on the same day, Visaka and Shiva’s mother end up in a tentative friendship and Shiva ends up becoming a kind of surrogate brother to Yasodhara and Yasodhara’s younger sister Lanka. When riots and other massacres begin to occur, Yasodhara’s family packs up and moves to Los Angeles, first meeting up with Visaka’s older brother, who had married a Burgher woman and then moved to the states. Book I ends with Yasodhara having acclimated to the United States and envisioning a full life beyond Sri Lanka. Book II begins with a radical shift in narrative perspective. It is told from the first person viewpoint of a young Tamil teenager named Sarawasthi; her family is being torn apart by the ethnoracial conflict. Two of Saraswathi’s brothers had already been recruited into the Tamil insurgency and died. Another brother named Kumar is drafted. Later, Saraswathi will be gang-raped, and this event forces her into the Tamil army, where she learns of what it means to be a revolutionary and to die for a political cause. The connection between narrative perspectives seems at first rather diffuse; Sarawasthi takes classes from the women who is possibly Yasodhara’s maternal grandmother (Muriel Spencer). Later, these competing narratives perspectives will see-saw against one another, creating an asymmetrical storytelling discourse that generates much anxiety in the reader. Yasodhara will have returned to Sri Lanka in the wake of a disintegrating marriage and is reunited with her childhood friend Shiva, while also re-establishing her relationship with her younger sister, as they teach at a local school. Saraswathi, for her part, is determined to become a martyr for the tigers. The novel ends a bit too quickly in my opinion. But bibliophiles, one must pick up the book simply for the incredibly luminous prose, reminiscent of poetry, absolutely seductive in its depictions. I was enamored of the voice from the get-go, and the storytelling grounds a phenomenal debut novel. In terms of writing style, it is not unlike le thi diem thuys’ The Gangster We are All Looking for; both novels are structured in general vignettes. There is more narrative coherence to Munaweera’s work, but both writers work off of the density and lyricism of language, while at the same time constructing such politically engaged narratives. I’ll be certain to teach this book in the future.

For other similar titles based upon Sri Lankan tensions between Tamils and Sinhala, see: Roma Tearne’s The Mosquito, Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, V.V. Ganeshenanthan’s Love Marriage:

http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/115944.html (Roma Tearne, Mosquito)

http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/146643.html (Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost)

http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/102180.html (V.V. Ganeshenanthan, Love Marriage)

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Island-Thousand-Mirrors-Nayomi-Munaweera/dp/125004393X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409410352&sr=8-1&keywords

A Review of Kat Zhang’s Echoes of Us (Harper, 2014)

Kat Zhang’s concluding installment of the Hybrid Chronicles is upon us! In Echoes Of Us, Addie and Eva return and are languishing in the shadow of the explosive events of book two. Along with a group of other hybrids on the run, they are constantly moving from one safe house to another, hoping for a lengthier solution and a way out of their status as fugitives. When Henri and Emalia go missing, it’s apparent that the group must move to another safe house, but they are found out and Peter seemingly gets shot (and killed), while another hybrid is captured. Addie and Eva are still able to escape and meet up with the remaining hybrids, but they know they are in trouble. With few resources and fewer options, they turn to a reporter for help. This reporter (named Marion) wants to work with the hybrids to get their story out. In addition, Marion promises what resources she can to keep the hybrids safe. In exchange, Marion requests that Addie and Eva go undercover at an institute for hybrids. Once there, they would surreptitiously document the goings-on with the use of a trusty little camera hidden within a ring. Addie and Eva would take the identity of an existing hybrid named Darcie Grey. Of course, things do not go as planned, but with the help of a former acquaintance, they are able to escape. From that point, the novel devolves into a sequence of subplots in which Addie and Eva are looking to get reunited with one character or another. Zhang is juggling a lot of balls here, trying to re-connect Addie and Eva their biological family, while making sure that all loose ends concerning minor characters and hybrids are fully fleshed out. Because there are so many different characters plunging off into different arenas, the concluding arc comes off as a bit unfocused and narrative momentum may be a question mark for some readers. The other element that comes up with respect to the narrative involves the question of foreigners. Zhang uses this term as a catch-all phrase for other countries, but it’s generally unclear what foreign means in the context of this novel, especially since the formation of national boundaries seems to have shifted in this fictional world. This murkiness leaves an important aspect of particularity untapped, leaving the fictional world a little bit too hazy and obscure. We should applaud Zhang for her unique concept, especially the political undertones that necessarily align the hybrids as symbols for social difference: the outcasts, the pariahs, the unfairly downtrodden. But the conclusion to the hybrid chronicles may still leave some readers feeling underwhelmed.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Echoes-Us-Hybrid-Chronicles-Book/dp/006211493X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410642793&sr=8-1&keywords=Kat+Zhang

A Review of Sherry Thomas’s The Perilous Sea (Balzer + Bray, 2014)

Sherry Thomas’s follow-up to The Burning Sky is The Perilous Sea, the second book in The Elemental Trilogy. The first installment saw Iolanthe Seabourne discovering that she is an elemental mage of rare power, so powerful in fact that she’s wanted by the very powerful and very evil Bane, who is leading Atlantis in order to find such magical individuals and sacrifice them so he can achieve immortality. Iolanthe’s man is none other than Prince Titus, who won’t let that happen and is determined to achieve his own destiny as the hero who will die attempting to defeat Bane. Titus relies on the visions of his now-dead mother Princess Ariadne, a gifted prophetess, who had foretold that Titus would one day have to team up with an elemental mage of great power if there was to be any chance to be able to defeat the great evil known as Bane. The second book places some big question marks in Princess Ariadne’s gift of prophecy, as Titus begins to wonder if the elemental mage of great power who was “the one” is in fact not Iolanthe but his schoolmate Wintervale. If such is the case, then Titus and Iolanthe’s destinies are in fact not intertwined at all, and Titus would have to place his attentions elsewhere and perhaps in that process also end his romance. This major storyline is intercut with another (which takes place approximately six weeks later). In this storyline two people are in the Sahara with no memory of who they are and whether or not they are allies or enemies to each other. They only know that they are being hunted by Atlantis and must put away any suspicions of each other if they are to escape unharmed. Thomas takes a big risk in having these chapters toggle between each other, especially as the reader’s attention is no doubt divided between these two very different storylines. There’s also quite a lot of revelations in the second installment, especially concerning various alliances, Iolanthe’s mysterious origins and birth family, and readers will have to be paying close attention to keep up with who is allied with whom, and what treasonous intentions certain characters may or may not be actually harboring. Many important characters from the first return including Kashkari, the Indian transnational, Lady Wintervale, Lady Callista, and even Master Haywood (yes, we do find out what’s happened to him). In any case, Thomas throws so much into the second act that some readers may balk at all that is going on. In addition to all of the plot-level revelations, Thomas is working within the conceits of the Oriental tale, the paranormal fantasy, the young adult fiction, as well as the requisite romance plot. Indeed, you not only have magic carpets, camels, and deserts (Oriental tales), but also sand wyverns, mages, magic wands (paranormal fantasy), teenagers (the boys at the boarding school who are engaging in ever important cricket matches), and lovebirds (Titus/ Iolanthe). There’s a lot to juggle and Thomas is certainly game, but even with all of these different elements thrown in, the conclusion to this installment reads more like a lead-up to the third book and doesn’t seem to stand on its own as a contained portion of the trilogy. Nevertheless, there is enough of a cliffhanger that, even if you weren’t fully on board with the second, you’ll want to stick around to find out what happens in the third. Will Titus be able to avoid his fate and thus allow Iolanthe and Titus to live happily ever after, while also defeating the supreme evil known as Bane? We’ll just have to wait and see, and then we’ll read.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Perilous-Sea-Elemental-Trilogy/dp/0062207326/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1412482751&sr=8-5&keywords=sherry+thomas

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Published on October 05, 2014 15:19

September 25, 2014

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for September 25, 2014

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for September 25, 2014

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide ranging and expansive terrain of Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

In this post, reviews of: Thrity Umrigar’s The Story Hour (Harper, 2014); Nguyen Tan Hoang’s A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Duke University Press, 2014); Lydia Kwa’s Sinuous (Turnstone Press, 2013); Cynthia Kadohata’s Half a World Away (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2014); Kendare Blake’s Anna Dressed in Blood (TorTeen 2011); Kendare Blake’s Girl of Nightmares (TorTeen, 2012); Amy Zhang’s Falling into Place (Greenwillow, 2014); The Accidental Apprentice (Minotaur Books, 2014).

A Review of Thrity Umrigar’s The Story Hour (Harper, 2014).

Thirty Umrigar’s latest novel (after a number of other publications including The Space Between Us, Bombay Time, The World We Found, The Weight of Heaven, If Today Be Sweet, and the nonfictional work First Darling of the Morning) is The Story Hour. The novel is told in alternating third and first person perspectives. The first person perspective is given to Lakshmi and rendered in a broken, immigrant English. The opening of the novel sees Lakshmi making the impulsive decision to commit suicide. Upon failing (and therefore enabling the main premise of the novel), she is given over to the care of psychologist named Maggie, who is of African American background and is married to an South Asian mathematic professors named Sudhir. The third person perspective is given to Maggie. Lakshmi’s case is referred to Maggie in part by the superficial expectation that she might understand Lakshmi better due to her marriage to Sudhir (even though, as we discover, Lakshmi and Sudhir come from relatively different caste and class backgrounds). Though Lakshmi’s husband is far from encouraging with respect to the forced therapy sessions that she is supposed to attend, Lakshmi eventually develops a unique and perhaps not so professional relationship with Maggie. Maggie gets Lakshmi to take driving lessons, cater the parties for friends, and even encourages her to take on an independent cleaning business. Lakshmi’s husband (Adit) is at first quite resistant to Lakshmi’s changes, but even he becomes convinced that her new diversions and occupations are doing her (and him) a world of good. Thus, Maggie and Lakshmi must navigate the complicated waters between doctor-patient and friend-friend connections. As these proprietary boundaries break down, other issues begin to come to the surface. For instance, we discover the reason behind why Lakshmi’s marriage is so rocky in the first place. Adit is not merely a hulking goon with the intent of insulating Lakshmi at every turn; behind his menacing demeanor is a man who has been scorned (a rather complicated story involving Lakshmi’s biological family). Additionally, it becomes clear that Maggie is struggling not only a little bit professionally, but also personally. The history of a more subtle from of sexual abuse (when she was a child) begins to create a pall over her life, especially as she engages an extramarital affair with a man named Peter, who has come to the local university on a visiting appointment. Peter is handsome, spontaneous, and white; he seems in so many ways a polar opposite to Sudhir. Lakshmi gains more and more confidence over the course of the narrative, especially as enabled by Maggie’s encouragement, but the gulf between these two characters is large, and Umrigar is well aware that misunderstandings of many forms are meant to keep these characters from having any sort of well-heeled friendship. By the concluding arc, Lakshmi makes a choice that will determine the course of Maggie’s faltering marriage. Umrigar’s novel ends on a sort of cliffhanger, which may polarize readers, but as with her previous works, characterization is the key to the depth and the success of the novel. Additionally, Umrigar complicates the narrative through the intricacies of inter-minority, feminist, and transnational intersectionalities. Certainly, Maggie comes from a Western-centric notion of female independence and further finds a sense of relationality to Lakshmi as a fellow woman of color, but Lakshmi’s own positioning as a new immigrant, one imbued by Indian standards for female propriety, makes any sort of coalition-building a difficult, if not treacherous one. This dissonance is the core of the novel’s ability to flourish and to showcase Umrigar’s ability to get at tricky social questions, while also rendering an entertaining story. We look forward to what the prolific Umrigar will have in store for us next and hope that her work garners the kind of attention already given to other writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Amy Tan in her astute rendering of transnational dynamics.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Story-Hour-Novel-Thrity-Umrigar/dp/006225930X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1411659148&sr=8-1&keywords=the+story+hour

A Review of Nguyen Tan Hoang’s A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Duke University Press, 2014).

I have to say: I’ve been waiting for a book like Nguyen Tan Hoang’s to appear that focused so SQUARELY on the queer Asian American experience, but was surprised by its title, especially given the archive it engages. Nevertheless, the argument is clear, focused, important, and as I mentioned LONG LONG awaited. Asian American men have long been associated with effeminacy, but the problem is magnified in some ways for Asian American men who identify as queer because it is almost assumed that they must be bottoms, that they cannot be anything other than passive, submissive, and receptive in their sexual proclivities. While it might be damaging to be situated from such a reductive positionality, Hoang’s point is that there might be pleasure and even complexity in the position of bottom-ness and he goes about exploring the varied contours of Asian American male bottom-ness from various angles. The archive he chooses to engage is an interesting and eclectic one, including pornographic films, experimental films, mainstream and art house films (my favorite chapter which is on a film I knew nothing about: Reflections in a Golden Eye). The most polemic chapter, I think, explores the politics of interracial and intraracial dating for Asian American men. This discourse has long been a thorny one, especially as the choice of the “sexual object” becomes politicized. Asian American men who date Caucasians might get labeled as “potato queens,” while Asian American men who date Asians might get labeled “sticky rice.” In the latter scenario, as Hoang rightly notes, the phenomenon of sticky rice is often seen as the politically progressive mode of dating for queer Asian American men because it resists the paradigm of normativity that renders the queer Caucasian body as most hallowed and most desired. Yet, Hoang states that this viewpoint is too reductive and reduces the complexity of queer Asian American mens’ sexual preferences. Hoang’s readings are all quite inventive and nuanced, and he pulls off his central contentions both comprehensively and eloquently. If there is an area I would have liked a little bit more information or analysis about, it would have been in relation to queer Asian American men in popular culture, ones relegated to the side kick role. Hoang gestures to this course in his analysis of Anacleto, the flaming Filipino queen from Reflections in the Golden Eye, but the contemporary moment does boast some interesting reiterations of this figure in characters played by actors Alec Mapa and Rex Lee, for instance. Finally, Hoang’s book focuses strictly on queer Asian American male representation, a fact that he makes clear, but one wonders about the archive of queer Asian American femininity and sexual representation as well. Perhaps, Hoang already has a sequel waiting in the wings that will take on this exact topic! =)

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/View-Bottom-American-Masculinity-Representation/dp/0822356848/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409034161&sr=8-1&keywords=nguyen+tan+hoang

A Review of Lydia Kwa’s Sinuous (Turnstone Press, 2013)

Lydia Kwa’s Sinuous is her fifth publication after one poetry collection (The Colors of Heroines) and three novels (This Place Called Absence; The Walking Boy; and Pulse). I haven’t had a chance to read everything in Kwa’s oeuvre, but of the material I have perused, it’s quite clear that Kwa is invested in a multitextured form of writing, always pushing herself both aesthetically and politically. Such is the case with Sinuous, a poetry collection that defies easy description or categorization. Indeed, though broken up into parts, the collection seems to cohere more generally as a long poem, something epic in quality. In this vein, we do have a central heroine, who seems to be struggling in the face of familial phantoms. Kwa obviously draws upon her experience as a psychologist, with references to Pierre Janet, Abraham and Torok, and others throughout the text. Of note especially is the concept of the trasngenerational phantom, which appears here in the little that the autobiographically-based lyric speaker understands of her parents, especially her mother. A section of the collection, for instance, is set in Japan. The lyric speaker has traveled there in part to due some research (reflecting again the autobiographical impulse as this research was something that Kwa did indeed do for her second novel The Walking Boy), but she harbors questions about how her mother would have interfaced with such a space given the long standing enmity between Singapore and Japan. Another prominent strain of lyric inquiry in this collection is the issue of disaporic subjectivity: the lyric speaker reflects upon her time as an immigrant studying in Canada and her place there, with its long history of racial and ethnic tensions. As I mentioned earlier, Kwa is a particularly political poet and she weaves historical events and legislative acts throughout her personal quests to root out sources of melancholy, trauma, and the tombs harbored by others that return upon her unbidden as ghostly presences. To get a sense of Kwa’s performative qualities, too, you can look here:

http://www.turnstonepress.com/national-poetry-month/2014-national-poetry-month-lydia-kwa.html

What’s useful in the link is that Kwa’s excerpt is prefaced by her inspiration from the poem:

“Old man in the opposite booth mirrors my future with his seasoned jowls, his weary eyes disinterested in youth’s foolish indulgences. Affirms that I too am travelling away from birth, settling into my private autumn. I feel the buzz of Filipino families in the warm ambience of New Town bakery—their bright voices chirp at the edge of my attention.

We could almost forget, sitting here, that we are forever foreign in this adopted country.

Dianne the waitress still wears her hair in a voluminous roll-up bun, now dyed jet black—looks like she recently stepped out from the Tang dynasty court, voluptuous and swaggering all at once, a cowboy courtesan in the 21st century.”

What is key in this excerpt is of course the question of belonging, as the lyric speaker references the fact of being “forever foreign.” But what I absolutely adore about Kwa’s work in Sinuous is the level of detail that appears in these prose poems down to the name of the waitress as well as the unique juxtapositions that Kwa uses (such as “cowboy courtesan” and “seasoned jowls”). This excerpt is quite effective as a model for what Kwa achieves throughout Sinuous, which winds its way through many countries, historical periods, and asks many questions about the lyric speaker in relation to her identity, her family, and the search to contextualize her life amongst the larger structural forces of immigration, postcolonial trauma, and racial formation. A very teachable collection and certainly one that would pair well with some of the most canonical Asian North American poets such as Marilyn Chin, Lawson Inada, and others.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Sinuous-Lydia-Kwa/dp/0888014473/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409793497&sr=8-1&keywords=lydia+kwa+sinuous

A Review of Cynthia Kadohata’s Half a World Away (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2014).

I wasn’t expecting Cynthia Kadohata to publish something so quickly after the stellar book The Thing about Luck (which also NOT surprisingly won a National Book Award), but we can’t complain as Kadohata returns with an intriguing, but ultimately uneven story about a young adoptee named Jaden, of Romanian background. He still struggles to feel accepted by his new-ish family and finds that he cannot come to love them. Kadohata is particularly searing in her portrayal of the adoptee’s complicated subjectivity. In this case, Jaden seems well aware that he has not yet integrated his parents into his life in a secure way, yet we understand why such is the case, given all that he has been through. Kadohata presents Jaden’s parents as Western archetypes of the adoptive parents whose cards are all in, to the extent that they provide Jaden with psychological counseling and other such support systems. They offer him every possible opportunity to address his mental health, especially given the fact that he routinely acts out. The novel’s central tension arises around the adoption of another boy, one that is located in Kazakhstan. As per national policy, the entire family must travel there in order to show that they have bonded with the child, so the novel eventually shifts to the family’s movement to that location. Here, complications arise as the boy that they thought were adopting is already given to another couple, and the family must choose, spur of the moment, among a set of babies, without necessarily being able to consider what the best course of action might actually be. While in Kazakhstan, Jaden ends up bonding to a four year old boy from a separate pool of orphans. His connection is so strong that he ends up trying to convince his parents to adopt that child instead, but Jaden’s parents are dead set on adopting a baby (instead of a toddler or young child). The novel’s strength is in Kadohata’s ability to render the psychic landscape of children with such richness. Jaden isn’t shown as heroic or evil, but certainly flawed and traumatized, yet well aware of his inner strength and desire to survive. He’s a prickly character, one that readers may not necessarily embrace right away, but Kadohata always knows how to bring the reader around, and this ability is exactly why she’s such a successful children’s literature author. At the same time, the discourse of international adoption is such a thorny one that embedding it in a fictional world such as this necessarily elides the many issues that do come up with respect to the process. For instance, the many miscommunications that occur in the process of adoption brings up the discourse of potential child trafficking that may be happening. Kadohata never gestures to this possibility, but one can’t help but think about these possibilities, as the Kazakh “orphans” are basically commodities that can be purchased by Western families with the right kind of money (in the novel’s case, the family needs to bring crisp one hundred dollar bills for the proper adoption to occur). Though the central family at the core of the novel seems to find a kind of stability by the novel’s end, we can’t help but read beyond this domestic unity and wonder about the fates of so many other children. Of note, of course, is Kadohata’s use of a country that has had little representational exploration in fictional worlds (at least from the American perspective). On this level, the novel manages to break open a cultural conversation that would obviously be invaluable for readers of all ages.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Half-World-Away-Cynthia-Kadohata/dp/1442412755/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409954521&sr=8-1&keywords=half+a+world+away

A Review of Kendare Blake’s Anna Dressed in Blood (TorTeen 2011)

I’m writing a paper that I will deliver to students at some point on YA fictions, specifically the “paranormal romance” “urban fantasy” “young adult” fiction mash-up, which has been of late all the rage (with many Hollywood adaptations in this area: Twilight and The Hunger Games probably being the most visible two currently). My piece is more specifically devoted to representations of the undead in YA fiction, so I had to obviously read Blake’s Anna Dressed in Blood, the first of a two-part series (no third in sight?). The protagonist and narrator is Cas Lowood, an attractive, teenager who is apparently also a ghost hunter. He travels with his mother to a new town to hunt down the local ghost, Anna Korlov. These ghosts are a tremendous problem because in the afterlife, their tendency is to use their rage and anger at their own unceremonious demise to kill living beings. Using a special knife that he is connected to by blood, Cas is able to send the ghosts to another realm and banish them from ours. Cas’s new ghost-target, though, has peculiar abilities. Indeed, she is far more powerful than any other ghost he has thus far encountered; in fact, an early scene sees her rip Cas’s antagonistic classmate in half (yuck!). In any case, he realizes he must enlist the help of some local teens, including a potential love interest, Carmel Jones; a budding witch and psychic, Thomas Sabin; as well as a reluctant jock-type named Will. Blake throws the paranormal romance wrinkle into the equation because we know, of course, that Cas will eventually come to fall in love with Anna, who is titularly dressed in blood, because she is apparently killed in a dress that she was going to wear to a high school dance. Will love conquer all somehow or will Cas have to banish his beloved, yet violent Anna? To find out, you’ll just have to read the book. My larger concern in terms of my own academic interests is of course in the political heft of the novel. Should we care about how ghosts have been marginalized? Should we instead focus on the strange inclusion of ethnic and racial spiritual markers (Wendigo and Haitian/Louisiana voodoo pops up at various points)? Having read so many within the genre at this point, it is clear that there is a particular universal theme between light and dark, good and evil. Most of the novels want to trouble what is initially evil and show us that we must look at what is bad within a more multi-faceted lens. To be sure, such a rhetorical slant is important, but is that enough? In any case, Blake follows the tried and true paranormal romance formula, but deviates in a huge way by making the central protagonist a male. The recent film adaptation of The Maze Runner does bring up this issue in mind. Even with the male protagonist, the rules of the genre need to be obeyed. In this respect, Cas Lowood does seem to be the ordinary, but not quite so ordinary teen, who must defeat an incredible evil, while also getting a little bit of romance along the way. Blake knows the genre conceits and if it ain’t broke, why fix it? Certainly, a frothy, but nevertheless eminently consumable YA fiction.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Anna-Dressed-Blood-Kendare-Blake/dp/B008VJYFIK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1375832390&sr=8-1&keywords=Anna+Dressed+in+Blood

A Review of Kendare Blake’s Girl of Nightmares (TorTeen, 2012).

The follow-up to Kendare Black’s Anna Dressed in Blood of course raises the stakes for all involved. The cataclysmic conclusion from the last novel (not to be spoiled here) leaves Cas Lowood in a kind of malaise. He’s drifting from one ghost hunting assignment to the next, even though there is a sense of a new community that’s developed around him. Indeed, instead of moving to a new location, Cas is staying in Thunder Bay; he’s become close friends with Thomas Sapin, the budding witch, and Carmel Jones, the popular girl-turned-reluctant ally. There are indications though that something is amiss with his athame (the magical weapon used to vanquish ghosts) and when Anna Korlov, the evil ghost that appeared in the first novel seems to be haunting him, we know that there is far more in store for Cas Lowood. The mystery around what has happened to Anna deepens in this novel; Cas, trying to find out why his nightmares are filled with Anna, travels to London in the hopes of figuring out what he can do to understand the situation he is in. Part of this quest is of course related to his magical weapon. Thus this novel delves into the history of the weapon itself and the mystical community that revolves around ghost hunting. A old family friend named Gideon seems to hold the key to the past concerning the weapon, but once Cas arrives in London (alongside his mother and Thomas) more questions inevitably arise. Blake’s follow-up is a fitting story to what seems to be the conclusion to the “Anna” series (Blake has moved onto a new series, also out with TorTeen). I was particularly struck by the unsentimental ending, one that places this novel above many of its contemporary counterparts. I was also looking around for other reviews of this novel, just because I was curious about other evaluations of it and managed to come across this one, which includes a rather detailed character list, one far more intricate than mine!

http://seriestracker.wordpress.com/ya/ghosts/anna/girl-of-nightmares/

This review brings up an interesting point about the “suicide forest” setting that appears in the concluding arc. It was something I thought about, too, and the location of where this forest is set (Scotland) does not dovetail with its real world analogue (Japan). Beyond these elements, too, one wonders about whether or not such a novel would qualify for “Asian American literature” given the fact that the novel’s main connection to the field appears through the author’s background rather than anything else. But, as with the first installment, Blake knows the formula and doesn’t fiddle too much with it. Her ghost-hunting approach to the paranormal fantasy romance is certain to entertain its target readers.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Girl-Nightmares-Anna-Dressed-Blood/dp/0765328666/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376065813&sr=8-1&keywords=Girl+of+Nightmares

A Review of Amy Zhang’s Falling into Place (Greenwillow, 2014).

Amy Zhang’s debut Falling into Place comes with a tagline that “there are no accidents.” We can take this phrase literally with respect to the major event that the novel foregrounds: the car accident involving the protagonist Liz Emerson, who we find out is in critical condition. The car accident occurred because Liz wanted to kill herself, a fact that the novel spends its two hundred pages unraveling through a series of anachronic vignettes. The structure of the story is meant as a playful nod to the discipline of physics that threads throughout the narrative in which Newtonian mechanics becomes a backdrop to the ways that things fall or do not fall into place. This novel is ultimately about melancholy and about high school bullying. Liz Emerson is not a nice person, but inside the queen bee mean girl is an introspective, guilt-ridden teenager who wants to be everything but the identity she performs. Her two best friends, Julia and Kennie (short for Kendra), follow her around in a way that would remind any conversant high school movie watcher of the plastics from Mean Girls. They ruin the reputations of fellow students, get drunk at parties, dabble in drugs, and draw the attention of many male classmates at their high school. Hovering in the background as a ghostly event in the past is the death of Liz’s father, who fell off a roof while trying to make sure Liz herself did not draw too close to the edge. Liz’s relationship with her mother is merely functionalist: they cannot find an intimacy with each other that leaves Liz without a real emotional support. Even with her two closest friends, she can’t seem to tell them exactly what is tearing her apart. Julia and Kennie have their own crosses to bear. Julia is struggling with a drug addition, while Kennie must face her tormented feelings over an abortion she had. The novel of course hinges upon whether or not we sympathize at all with Liz, and Zhang has generated a character that is surely to provoke strong reactions in the reader. On the one hand, Zhang clearly contextualizes why Liz acts the way she does and what even pushes her to try to commit suicide. And of course suicide is the large discourse the novel revolves around as a political context, so much so that the conclusion provides some contact information for a support group. On the other hand, the novel is strangely devoid of a larger historical and sociocultural texture. Indeed, there is little sense of when the novel takes place or if the characters are aware of current events beyond the issues going on at their school. Thus, the novel takes on a generic quality on this level that can make the characters seem a little more superficial than some readers will prefer. Otherwise, Zhang’s structural conceit and discursive storytelling techniques are top notch and make this young adult novel certainly a dynamic formal approach to the genre.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Falling-into-Place-Amy-Zhang/dp/0062295047/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410484091&sr=8-1&keywords=Amy+Zhang

A Review of Vikas Swarup’s The Accidental Apprentice (Minotaur Books, 2014).

(high res non US edition cover)

(low res US edition cover)

Of all the novels I’ve read in 2014, Vikas Swarup’s third The Accidental Apprentice (after Q&A and Six Suspects) was the most surprising to me based upon the plotting, which includes a late stage revelation that I could not remotely predict. For that reason alone, I would strongly encourage readers to go out and get this book, which is fairly long, but makes for fast reading and would be absolutely perfect for a long vacation, where you can sit by the pool, work on a tan, and delve into a very entertaining story. As with Swarup’s previous novels, the story is set in India. Our protagonist and storyteller is none other than Sapna Sinha, a young twenty-ish woman who works as a salesgirl for an electronics store. One day, she randomly meets a CEO of a large company (a man named Acharya), who states that he will make Sapna the CEO of his company so long as she passes seven tests. Appropriately, she thinks: this guy is a nutjob and is totally joking and passes on this opportunity, but when her family is about to be evicted from the apartment they are staying in (rented out to them from their uncle who is demanding more money), Sapna takes on the challenge offered by Acharya (which comes with a large money advance that is nonrefundable even if she fails) and is able to save her family from being homeless. Six of the seven tests accordingly go well enough (and I won’t spoil for you what these test are and how they operate), but it is in the seventh where the novel kicks into high gear, shifting the tone and the genre of the novel into something else entirely. This change is certainly welcome insofar as readers begin to see a sort of routine occurring concerning Sapna, who, though living in a state of tenuous financial stability and no more than a middle class denizen herself, possesses a particularly high bar of moral and ethical standards. She often intervenes in the lives of others with little care that she may be harming herself or endangering her own life in the process. Swarup’s point in making Sapna a heroine is not simply for a good story: he is able to conjure up many of India’s largest social ills, including illegal organ harvesting, child labor, honor killings/ coercions, arranged marriages, corporate corruption, sexual harassment and the reality television industry, among other such issues. The novel’s final gambit seems much less focused on structural forces that result in oppression and inequality, but still, that would be to miss another major point concerning the frequent issue of caste and class that continue to play out whenever it concerns marriage and romance. The heart of the family thus is always ultimately a political matter in the Indian Anglophone novel, which Swarup makes so evidently clear in this incredibly plotted novel of a run-of-the mill heroine thrown into extraordinary circumstances. You can’t help but wonder if they would make a Hollywood adaptation of the film, but you’d obviously be thinking about the lack of options for someone to play Sapna Sinha, much less the rest of her family, and the other major characters. In any case, you have to pick up this thrilling and thriller of a novel and enjoy the random twists and turns that make for one of the best summer/ fall reads this year. Oh, and as a p.s., if you think too logically about the plot, you’re already missing the point. The novel is a ridiculous social satire masked as an action-thriller.

For other similar titles, see:

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/112476.html

Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/122208.html

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Accidental-Apprentice-A-Novel/dp/125004555X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409842717&sr=8-1&keywords=the+accidental+apprentice

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Published on September 25, 2014 17:40

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