Tender Is the Bite by Spencer Quinn: It's Monday

 Meme: It's Monday: What Are You Reading

Tender Is the Bite by Spencer Quinn, Chet and Bernie Mystery #11

Publication: June 1, 2021. 

Source: NetGalley

I'm enjoying another Chet and Bernie mystery, narrated by the clever PI dog, Chet, in his limited but very smart and observant  way.  Chet rescues Bernie in more than one instance while the detecting duo solve murders and find missing persons. Another entertaining and suspenseful read.

Description: Chet the dog and his partner in solving crimes, PI Bernie, are contacted by a terribly scared young woman who seems to want their help. Before she can even tell them her name, she flees in panic. But in that brief meeting Chet sniffs out an important secret about her, a secret at the heart of the mystery he and Bernie set out to solve.

Also still reading: 

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

Hidden Treasure by Jane Cleland

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Vanessa Yu's Magical Paris Tea Shop by Roselle Lim

You can see I have several books by Asian and Asian Pacific authors! And they are quite good!

What are you reading this week? 

Sunday Salon: Edge Case by YZ Chin

 Edge Case by YZ Chin, August 10, 2021, Ecco

Genre: immigration fiction, contemporary fiction

After another taxing day as the sole female employee at her New York City tech startup, Edwina comes home to find that her husband, Marlin, has packed up a suitcase and left. The only question now is why. (publisher)

Edwina and Marlin are both from Malaysia, living and working in NYC and hoping to get that elusive and much desired green card that will mean a  bona fide status as resident immigrants. But when Edwina finds Marlin gone, she must decide how to proceed alone. The book is described as a novel of "immigration, identity, and marriage."

I've been able to read this ebook before publication date, thanks to an advance copy available from Netgalley.  

What are you reading this week? 

Memes: The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer. Also,  It's Monday: What Are You Reading, and Sunday Salon

Book Beginning: The Boat Rocker by Ha Jin

The Boat Rocker by Ha Jin, October 25, 2016

Book beginning:

Chapter One

A week before the fourth anniversary of 9/11, my boss, Kaiming, barged into my office, rattling a three-page printout in his hands.

"Look at this, Danling," he said, dropping the papers on my desk. "This is outrageous! How could they claim that George W. Bush had agreed to endorse a book by Yan Haili? Everyone can tell it's a lie the size of heaven."

Page 56:

Then she said, "I have written a script, and a movie company has been considering it."

About the book: From the award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash: an urgent, timely novel that follows an aspiring author, an outrageous book idea, and a lone journalist’s dogged quest for truth in the Internet age. (publisher)

Memes: The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader. 

Another Great Library Find: Big Breasts and Wide Hips by Mo Yan

I found an intriguing library book: a novel and an historical one at that.
Big Breasts and Wide Hips, a novel by Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan, author of Red Sorghum, published 2014.

Book description: This is a book about women but it's also a book about China, from the fall of the Qing dynasty up through the Japanese invasion in the 1930s, the civil war, the Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao years. In sum, this stunning novel is Mo Yan's searing vision of 20th-century China.

In a country where men dominate, and as the title implies, the female body serves as the book's most important image and metaphor. The protagonist, Mother, is born in 1900. Married at 17 into the Shangguan family, she has nine children, only one of whom is a boy, the narrator of the book, a spoiled and ineffectual child who stands in stark contrast to his eight strong and forceful female siblings.

Mother, a survivor, is the quintessential strong woman, who risks her life to save the lives of several of her children and grandchildren. The writing is full of life-picturesque, bawdy, shocking, imaginative. (publisher)

The title and topics and history are inviting an exploration of Mo Yan's unique vision!

Mo Yan is a modern Chinese author, known for his novel Red Sorghum (which was turned into a movie by the same title). Often described as the Chinese Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller.

Author Q & A: Oleander Girl by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Friday 56 Rules: *Grab a book, any book, and post a sentence from page 56. Add your (url) post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also Book Beginnings by Rose City Reader.

Oleander Girl

Page 56: Eighteen years lost already - I can't waste any more time. The need to find out everything about my parents, suddenly, is like an ache in my bones, a deep deficiency.

Opening paragraph: I am swimming through a long, underwater cavern flecked with blue light, the cavern of love, with Rajat close behind me. We're in a race, and so far I'm winning because this is my dream. Sometimes, when I'm dreaming, I don't know it. But tonight I do. Sometimes when I'm awake, I wonder if I'm dreaming. That, however, is another story. 

A Conversation with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni about Oleander Girl,  a sweeping, suspenseful coming-of-age tale about a young woman who leaves India for America on a search that will transform her life.

How did you become a writer? Did you always know you wanted to be one?

Growing up in India, I never thought I'd be a writer. I didn't believe I had either the talent or the drive or a special story to tell. But immigration thrust me into a whole different world which was at once exciting and disconcerting in its newness. I wrote to make sense of my new life, and to remember the life that I had left behind.

You often set your books in India. What attracts you to the Indian landscape?

The landscape of one's childhood imprints itself upon the heart. In my case, that was India. Add to that the fact that Indian culture is old and complex and currently, due to globalization, undergoing a rapid transformation, and you have possibilities for many stories. In Oleander Girl, for instance, the two protagonists, Korobi and Rajat, come from very different families. Korobi's is steeped in tradition; Rajat's is westernized and newly rich. When Korobi and Rajat fall in love, this will lead to many complications.

A family secret lies at the heart of Oleander Girl. What made you decide to focus on this?

My own family had a dark secret of its own. When I discovered it, it turned my life upside down. I felt betrayed by the people I had trusted all my life—and yet I couldn't stop loving them. I wanted to explore these painful, contradictory feelings through Korobi's situation. She is braver than I was—she traveled across the world in search of that secret.

Do you write your books in English, or in some other language?

I write all my books in English. My mother-tongue is Bengali, but English was the language of my schooling. I read Bengali fluently, and when my mother was alive I wrote letters to her in that language. She told me once that it was a good thing I didn't write anything else in Bengali! (I think my vocabulary is at the 6th grade level). I do participate, though, when my books are translated into Bengali.

Oleander Girl is set in the year 2002. Why did you decide on this time period?

An important question in Oleander Girl is how can we live in amity with difference, both racial and religious? The year 2002 illustrates the price we have to pay when we choose not to do so.  In 2002, in the U.S., people were suffering the aftermath of 9/11—both the tragedy of the deaths in the Towers and elsewhere, and the violent fear and prejudice that swept the nation and affected the lives of many Americans who looked like I do. In India, 2002 was the year of the terrible Godhra Riots that led to deadly clashes between Hindus and Muslims.

How did you come up with the title of this novel? In what way is it central to the theme of the book?

The heroine Korobi's name means Oleander in Bengali. From childhood, Korobi wants to know why her mother, who dies in childbirth, would want to name her after a flower that is beautiful but poisonous. She will discover the answer at the end, and along with that she will understand what kind of woman her mother wanted her to be. And this—how women need to balance between what they owe others and what they owe themselves—is an important theme in the novel.

 

What are you working on now?

I'm working on a novel that is a re-working of our famous epic, The Ramayana. I am re-telling it from the point of view of Sita, the central woman character. The teller of the tale changes the meaning of the tale. By putting a woman at the center of an epic adventure, I hope to draw attention to different issues and make readers re-evaluate their beliefs about what is heroic.

About the Author

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is the author of The Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart, and The Vine of Desire; two short story collections, Arranged Marriage and The Unknown Errors of Our Lives; four volumes of poetry; and an award-winning novel for young readers, The Conch Bearer. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times. Winner of an American Book Award, she teaches creative writing at the University of Houston.

Thanks to Simon and Schuster for providing this Q &A.

Memoir: THE COOKED SEED by Anchee Min

Title: The Cooked Seed: A Memoir by Anchee Min
Published: May 7, 2013; Bloombury USA hardcover

The date was August 3, 1984. It was China's midnight and America's morning. I was about to drop out of the sky and land in Chicago. What made me scared and nervous was that I didn't speak English and had no money. The five hundred dollars I had folded in my wallet was borrowed. But I could not let myself be frightened. I was twenty-seven years old and life had ended for me in China. I was Madame Mao's trash, ..., which meant that I wasn't worth spit. For eight years, I had worked menial jobs at the Shanghai Film Studio. I was considered a "cooked seed" - no chance to sprout. (opening paragraph from the Advance Reading Copy)

Publisher's description:
In 1994, Anchee Min made her literary debut with a memoir of growing up in China during the violent trauma of the Cultural Revolution. Red Azalea became an international bestseller and propelled her career as a critically acclaimed author. Twenty years later, Min returns to the story of her own life to give us the next chapter, an immigrant story that takes her from the shocking deprivations of her homeland to the sudden bounty of the promised land of America, without language, money, or a clear path.

It is a hard and lonely road. She teaches herself English by watching Sesame Street, keeps herself afloat working five jobs at once, lives in unheated rooms, suffers rape, collapses from exhaustion, marries poorly and divorces.But she also gives birth to her daughter, Lauryann, who will inspire her and finally root her in her new country. Min's eventual successes- her writing career, a daughter at Stanford, a second husband she loves- are remarkable, but it is her struggle throughout toward genuine selfhood that elevates this dramatic, classic immigrant story to something powerfully universal.

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by MizB; choose sentences from your current read and identify author and title for readers. First Chapter, First Paragraph is hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea. Opening sentences in a book can help readers decide if the book is one they would continue reading. 

Based on the opening paragraph of The Cooked Seed, would you keep reading?

Thanks to the publisher for an ARC of this book. 

Book Review: Tiger Babies Strike Back by Kim Wong Keltner

Kim Wong Keltner's memoir describes her life growing up under the thumb of a demanding and stoic Chinese mother. Kim says she suffered from lack of affectionate hugs, outward shows of love, words of praise from her mother, and eventually moved away from their home in San Francisco after her marriage to native Californian, Rolf Keltner, to gain independence and a better perspective. But she says this about her mother:

The Reamer (Irene, her mother) didn't coddle me. But it wasn't for lack of love. She did not coddle me because she loved me. She wanted me to be strong so I could live without her." (ch. 38)

Kim gives this message to Tiger Parents, those parents who push their children to extremes toward success.

Tiger Parents,you may be asking yourselves, "What is the point of this book?"
Love your babies, and show your babies that you love them. Withholding acceptance and praise while pushing your children into achievement might yield certain results, but that kind of pressure stifles other aspects of growing up." (epilogue)

And there are messages for the children of Tiger parents,  for whom she wrote this book:

"Have an emotional life. Please yourself. Second best ain't worth killing yourself over...."

The author cites Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother as an impetus for her book and as a response to Chua's Tiger Mother perspective.

To those who were not born with Tiger Parents, this sort of advice may seem unwarranted, but the author clearly feels everything she puts into the book. And there is a lot of emotion here. The memoir seems to rant at the beginning and even to generalize about who Tiger Mothers are and how they came to be. However, the author soon gets into specifics with examples from her family, acquaintances, and from her own life.

Not all Tiger Children escape unscathed from their parents' upbringing as Kim did. Some are forever stifled, she shows. These Tiger Children include those who never leave home and are brought up with the sole idea of being their parents' caretakers, or the child whose romantic and personal life is squelched by overwhelming family /parental disapproval.

One of the early drawbacks: living in a "Tiger box" made it hard for Kim to develop female friendships while growing up. Other Chinese girls in their own Tiger boxes wanted to show independence or exhibited one-upmanship, which prevented close alliances.

One exception to the Tiger parent rule was Kim's kinder grandmother Lucy, whom she remembers with fondness and brings into mind the difference between the generations in bonding with children.

I understood and felt everything that the author was trying to say, even though my parents are a generation removed from the "old country." A strict culture filters down inexorably though it may dissipate somewhat on the way down. I am anxious to see what others think about Kim's memoir, those who weren't raised within such strict confines. There is a lot in the book for general readers, to understand the interior of a traditional (though what might seem a somewhat stereotypical) Chinese family.

Title: Tiger Babies Strike Back: How I Was Raised By a Tiger Mom But Could Not Be Turned to the Dark Side by Kim Wong Keltner
Published April 30, 2013; William Morrow paperback
Genre: memoir
Objective rating: 4.5/5

For other reviews of the book, visit the TLC Book Tour schedule.

About the author: 
The only thing that keeps Kim Wong Keltner from writing is when she’s trapped under an avalanche of her daughter’s stuffed animals. Kim is the author of The Dim Sum of All Things, Buddha Baby, and I Want Candy. Tiger Babies Strike Back is her first work of non-fiction. You can reach her at kimwongkeltner.com

Thanks to TLC Book Tours and the publisher for an ARC review copy of the book.

Also submitted to Teaser Tuesday, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading, and to Cym Lowell's Book Review Link-Up Party.

Author Khanh Ha, guest post

Welcome to Khanh Ha, author of the historical novel Flesh (Black Heron Press, 2012) set in early 20th century Vietnam. He gives us the background and inspiration for his book and the family history that impels this story.  He also discusses his upcoming and second novel.
Flesh

The Ideas and Inspiration Behind It

by Khanh Ha

Flesh, is set in Tonkin (now northern Vietnam) at the turn of the 20th century. It tells the story of a sixteen-year-old boy who witnesses the execution, by beheading of his father, a notorious bandit and sets out to recover his father’s head, and then finds the man who betrayed his father to the authorities.

A coming-of-age story of brutal self-awakening and also a tender love story, takes the reader into places, both dark and wonderful, in the human condition where allies are not always your friends, true love hurts, and your worst enemy can bring you the most solace. As its author, I was asked what inspired me to write about this specific subject.

There was an image formed in my mind after I read a book called War and Peace in Hanoi and Tonkin, which was written by a French military doctor. In one chapter he depicted an execution by capital punishment. The scene took place on a wasteland outside Hanoi. This bandit was beheaded for his crime while the onlookers, some being his relatives with children, watched in muted fascination and horror. While reading it, I imagined a boy—his son—was witnessing the decapitation of his father by the hand of the executioner. I pictured him and his mother as they collected the body without the head which the government would display at the entrance of the village his father had looted. I thought what if the boy later set out to steal the head so he could give his father an honorable burial. What if he got his hand on the executioner’s sabre and used it to kill the man who betrayed his father for a large bounty. However, it really started with a story within my family.  My mom told me that my grandfather was one of the last mandarins of the Hue Court, circa 1930.

At that time the Vietnamese communists were coming into power. They condemned any person a traitor, who worked either for the French or the Hue Court. So my grandpa was a traitor in their eye. One day news came to him that a communist gathering was to be held in one of the remote villages from Hue. He set out to that village with some of his bodyguards to punish the communists. Unfortunately, news leaked out about his trip. He was ambushed on the road—his bodyguards were killed—and he was beheaded. The communists threw his body into a river.

My grandma hired a witch doctor to look for his headless body. Eventually the witch doctor found it. They were able to identify his body based on the ivory name tablet in his tunic. My grandma hired someone to make a fake head out of a coconut shell wrapped in gilded paper and buried my grandpa on the Ngu Binh Mountain. The beheading of grandpa surfaced again while I was reading the decapitation scene in War and Peace in Hanoi and Tonkin.

I spend much, much time in researching before I write. I’m a perfectionist and the harshest critic of myself. I have to know everything about what I’m going to write—well, sort of—before I ever pen the first word. Indeed much research was done before I felt dead sure about writing it.

More than once I was asked if I’m currently busy with a work-in-progress.

Yes, I’m about done with my next novel. But I rarely talk about what I’m working on. It may sound like a hard-line stance. But well, I can give you a harmless description. When I was still a struggling young writer, I came across a very old Vietnamese magazine article written about a centenarian eunuch of the Imperial Court of Hue. He was already dead the year the story was published, circa 1966. Two years before I was born. A sketchy story whose facts were gleaned from the eunuch’s adopted daughter, that ended with a small halftone photograph of her portrait. I put the article away. But I couldn’t put the story away, even months after. It dawned on me then that it wasn’t the story.

It was the face in the photograph. I traveled to Hue, Vietnam in the summer of 1991. I was 23. I went with her image in the photograph and when I finally met her, the eunuch’s daughter, that image hadn’t changed. She was someone like a forbidden love to a young man half her age. The first time she gave me a glimpse of her past from her spotted memory, it was in a sugarcane field where two decades earlier, her lover—a young American—had died in her arms.

Thanks to the author for this very interesting post. For reviews of his book, visit Virtual Author Book Tours.

About the book:  
The title refers to temptation-the temptation of the flesh. But it refers equally to the obligations of kinship, the connections between us and those to whom we are related, even if we would choose not to be. 

Khanh Ha was born in Hue, the former capital of Vietnam. During his teen years, he began writing short stories, which won him several awards in the Vietnamese adolescent magazines. He graduated from Ohio University with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism. FLESH (Black Heron Press, June 2012) is his first novel (literary fiction).

Visit the author at: http://www.authorkhanhha.com

Thanks to Teddy Rose at Virtual Author Book Tours for this guest post by the author.

To see my July 26, 2012 comments on the book, visit my Review.

The Sunday Salon: Bathing Women by Tie Ning

Welcome to the Sunday Salon!

I just love Sunday mornings, browsing blogs by book bloggers (alliteration unintended) who often post on this day.

I found an interesting novel on Literary Hoarders' website - a book about contemporary life in China by Tie Ning.

The book description grabbed my interest:  A new generation of young professionals in contemporary China. The Bathing Women follows the lives of four women—Tiao, a children’s book editor; Fan, her sister, who thinks escaping to America might solve her problems; Fei,a hedonistic and self-destructive young woman; and Youyou, a chef—from childhood during the Cultural Revolution to adulthood in the new market economy. This moving novel charts the journey of these women as they grapple with love, sibling rivalry, and, ultimately, redemption. (publisher)

Browsing along this morning, I found an article that readers might like but which authors won't: Out of Touch: E-Reading Isn't Reading by Andrew Piper in Slate Magazine, listed by Man of La Book.
The blog listed another controversial post on e-books, Fair Warning for Those Who Read E-Books, by Confessions of a Mystery Novelist. If you have mixed feelings about ebooks versus paper books, as I do, you will want to read these posts!

I confess though, that I read all 1,000 pages of Murakami's IQ84 on a Kindle and might not have finished the book otherwise. That is one heavy book to carry around!

What do you think about the no longer new e-book controversy? And what new books have you gotten or read or found recently?

Book Review: Skeleton Women by Mingmei Yip

Skeleton Women by Mingmei Yip

>Title: Skeleton Women by Mingmei Yip
Paperback; May 25, 2012; Kensington Publishing
Source: author, for review
Objective rating: 4.5/5

About the book:In Mingmei Yip's novel set in 1930s Shanghai, Skeleton Women refer to women who are trained spies, beautiful assassins and courtesans who seduce their male victims in order to eventually turn them into skeletons of death.

And yet, the orphan Camilla, who was trained to be such a deceiver by her boss Master Wang, finds it difficult to dispose of Wang's rival Master Lung as she is ordered to do. She must first find out all Lung's financial secrets and where he stores his important papers and bank books. This is gang rivalry after all, and Wang intends to be the top man in Shanghai after defeating and disposing of his main rival, through his master spy, Camilla.

There are two other well known Skeleton Women in the book - a gossip columnist Rainbow Chang and a magician, Shadow. Shadow and Camilla, whose talent is as a singer known as the Heavenly Songstress, compete to be the best known celebrity for talent and beauty and both rely on Rainbow Chang to promote them in her newspaper column.

The novel is about the relationship between these skeleton women and about Camilla's increasing discomfort with her role as a virtual slave to Master Wang to spy and then assassinate, and being in the middle of the tug of war between Wang and Master Lung, who she must keep deceiving while she ferrets out his financial and gangland activities. There are other conflicts, namely her personal love life and growing emotional attachment to another, younger man.

My comments:The author quotes extensively from two Chinese classics by Sun Tzu, written more than 2,000 years ago - The Art of War and the essay The Thirty-Six Stratagems, which is described as "an essay used to illustrate a series of stratagems used in politics, war, as well as in civil interaction, often through unorthodox or deceptive means." Although Sun Tzu probably wrote for men, the author's character Camilla knows these works very well and uses the advice and strategies for her own means.

The novel is peppered throughout with Chinese sayings or aphorisms that reflect Camilla's own dilemmas, her observation of people or situations, and her plan of action.

Some of the sayings:

"If you pay enough, you can make a dead man turn a millstone." 

"When the rabbits are caught, the hounds are cooked." 

"...tiehan rouqing, an iron man with tender sentiments."

What also made this book enjoyable to read was the author's frequent inclusion of famous Chinese poetry and songs, words that mirror or reflect her feelings or situation. I wish I could include some of them here, but there are too many.

One question that I do have about the plot: If Camilla is known as a skeleton woman, why is she kept and trusted by her patron Master Lung, whom she has vowed to destroy? Even though he has his bodyguard search her every time she enters his bedroom, still he must have been taking a big chance!
I also liked that Camilla gradually changes from being callous and unfeeling to developing genuine love and feelings of human friendship as her life story goes on. How she deals with the twin rocks of disaster between which she is caught is the tension that also kept my interest in the novel.

A book I highly recommend for those interested in women's fiction, historical fiction, romance, and the poetry, and some of the classics of Chinese literature.

Learn more about the author at her websiteMingmei Yip and on her blog.

Book Review: Lulu in the Sky by Loung Ung

Title: Lulu in the Sky: A Daughter of Cambodia Finds Love, Healing and Double Happiness by Loung Ung
Published April 17, 2012; HarperCollins paperback
Rating: 5/5

Lulu in the Sky is the third book in a trilogy memoir by Loung Ung, a refugee from war torn Cambodia who came to the U.S. as a child with her oldest brother and his wife, settling in Vermont. Now an adult who is dedicated to Cambodia's future and working to ban landmines all over the world, she finally married her college sweetheart Mark. This happened after many years of putting off her commitment to personal happiness - to deal with the memory of her parents' and sisters' death in Cambodia during the war and leaving behind part of her family when she left Cambodia.

These experiences are the topic of the author's two previous memoirs, First They Killed My Father and Lucky Child. The two books detail the excesses of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, when millions of Cambodians were killed or executed, including Loung's parents and tells about the author's escape and arrival in America. In Lulu in the Sky, Loung tells us how she came to be reconciled with the past, to live in the present and continue into the future.

I don't need anyone. Even as I whispered this to myself, I knew I was lying.
"Why do you want to be with me when I'm such a mess?" I asked.
"Because you're brave and passionate and tender; you're a child and a wise woman."
"But I'm broken..."
"You're not broken. Not to me. Never to me."
Mark's kindness and compassion were what drew me to him in the beginning of our relationship. (ch. 18)

Loung exorcises the ghosts that haunt her by talking to a therapist, by writing about her experiences, and becoming an activist for international justice. She eventually finds happiness in her work and in her marriage to Mark.

For nine months, I revisited my childhood in Cambodia. With Mark and my friends at my side, I poured my love, anger, and hate into the computer. And in the midst of this writing, I traveled back and forth to Cambodia as a spokesperson for VVAF, leading delegations of supporters and public figures to tour our centers. (ch. 19)

The author continues to give lectures around the country and to talk to book clubs and other groups about her experiences and her international work. Her memoir is very moving. The detail in her books and her extraordinary memory, her clear writing, makes this book and the first two a must for those who know about the brutal history of Cambodia and for those who want to know more.

Loung Ung is an author, lecturer, and activist. She has advocated for equality, human rights, and justice in her native land and world wide for more than fifteen years. Ung lives in Cleveland, Ohio with her husband.

For other tour stops and reviews of this book, visit Lulu in the Sky Book Tour, sponsored by TLC Book Tours.

Thanks to TLC and the author, publisher, for a complimentary review copy of this book. 

Book Review: Lucky Child by Loung Ung

"...I have come to accept that I might never see Chou again. I know that somewhere in Cambodia, the remainder of our large family is waiting to join Meng and me in America, but missing them has become too difficult. And so I've begun to think of myself as the only sister, even though I remember being part of a big family. That life is gone and no matter how I wish it, it will never be so again." (ch.16)

Title: Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind
Author: Loung Ung
Publisher: Harper Perennial (April 11, 2006), paperback
Genre: memoir

Comments: To the general reader, the importance of this memoir by Loung Ung, the second of three books on Cambodia and life after the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese invasion, lies not only in its historical value but in the heartfelt story of a family destroyed and separated by war.

We see life through the eyes of a young 10 year-old-girl who is chosen by her oldest brother Meng to leave Cambodia with him and his wife, escape to Thailand, and then travel as refugees to Vermont, U.S.A. Loung is haunted by the memory of her older sister Chou, whom she left behind, and the two brothers also left in Cambodia. She also is haunted by the memory of her parents, both killed by the Khmer Rouge while she was still a young child in Cambodia.

 Lucky Child is the story of the two sisters, living and growing up in two different countries - the U.S.A. and Cambodia, about their eventual reunion, and their experiences in between the time they were separated as children and the time they were reunited in Cambodia as adults.

Recommendation: I would recommend this book and the others, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers and Lulu in the Sky to anyone wanting to know more about the period 1975-1979, when Cambodia was turned into the Killing Fields under the Khmer Rouge who murdered millions of its own people in order to establish their power. The book is also a story of survival, immigration and adjustment of refugees to life in the United States, eventual reconciliation of Loung's family, and their lives after a war of devastation.

About the author: Loung Ung was born to an affluent Cambodian father and Chinese mother, and was only 5 years old when the Khmer Rouge stormed into her native city of Phnom Penh. Four years later, in one of the bloodiest episodes of the 20th century, some two million Cambodians – out of a population of seven million – had died at the hands of the infamous Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime. Among the genocide victims were both Loung’s parents, two sisters, and 20 other relatives.

Today, Loung has made over 30 trips back to Cambodia. As an author, lecturer, and activist, she has dedicated 20 years to promoting equality, human rights, and justice in her native land and worldwide. To find out more about her work, visit her at http://loungung.com/

You can see the complete tour and other reviews of this book, thanks to TLC Book Tours.

I received a complimentary review copy of this book for the tour.

Book Review: How to Be an American Housewife by Margaret Dilloway

""Once you leave Japan, it is extremely unlikely that you will return, unless your husband is stationed there again or becomes wealthy.

Take a few reminders of Japan with you. If you have room. Or make arrangements to write to a caring relative who is willing to send you letters or items from your homeland. This can ease homesickness.

And be sure to tell your family, "Sayonara." (from the chapter, "Turning American" )

(The book later tells you that "Sayonara" doesn't mean just "goodbye," but "goodbye forever.")

Comments: This novel tells the story of a young Japanese woman who marries an American soldier after WWII and comes to live in America, becoming estranged from her brother Taro who remains bitter over the results of the war and the American bombing of Nagasaki.  In America, the young wife Shoko struggles to live among strangers in a different culture, and is given a book of advice by her American husband Charlie - How to Be an American Housewife. The story and the book are from the 1950s and the advice reflects the times.

Shoko's story is sad because of the estrangement from her brother, the hard time she has with English and raising her son and daughter in an environment unfamiliar to her, and also sad because of a secret she carried from Japan with her that she has told no one about. Redemption comes in the second part of the novel, when Shoko's adult daughter Suiko or Sue agrees to return to Japan for her mother, who has suffered a stroke and is unable to travel. Sue meets Shoko's cousins and reunites with Shoko's brother Taro, seeing Japan for the first time.

The novel is well-written and the characters, especially Shoko, realistic and sympathetic. The author based her book on her Japanese mother's experiences and the book that her father had given her mother to help her adjust to American society - How to Be an American Housewife.

Title: How To Be an American Housewife by Margaret Dilloway
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Berkley Trade; Reprint edition (August 2, 2011)
Genre: fiction, historical fiction
Objective rating: 4.5/5

This book was sent to me by the publisher through Shelf Awareness. My review and rating were in no way influenced by my receiving a complimentary copy.

Submitted to Japanese Literature Challenge V and  Immigrant Stories 2011 Challenge.

Book Reviews: "The Long Goodbye: a Memoir" and "Please Look After Mom: a Novel"

I found two excellent library books on similar subjects dealing with lost mothers, so am reviewing them together.

The Long Goodbye: A memoir by Meghan O'Rourke (April 14, 2011)
chronicles the days leading up to and the months after the death of the author's mother after a long illness. The book will resonate with anyone who has lost a close family member; it also discusses our society's general lack of mourning rituals that go beyond the period of death and burial. People go about their lives after the death of a loved one, but very often they may continue to mourn, very often alone and in silence. Fifteen months after her mother's death, O'Rourke is still affected by not having her mother in her life, but has come to a kind of acceptance. Heartbreaking and honest. Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Please Look After Mom: a Novel by Korean author Kyung-Sook Shin
 (April 5, 2011) tells us about the children of a Korean woman whose mother is missing after being separated from her husband on a visit to the big city in the crowded and unfamiliar subway. The mother is elderly and becoming disoriented and forgetful; her daughter has only recently realized that her mother cannot read or write. They don't know how to go about finding the mother, apart from posting newspaper notices, searching through the streets, and passing out leaflets with her picture.

During their search, the children find out more about their mother and each member of the family gradually comes to have a deeper understanding of her and the life of sacrifice she has lived.

Set in Korea, I find the novel both culturally revealing and haunting in its view of a family's dynamics and a mother's relationship with her children and husband. Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

A Thread of Sky by Deanna Fei

A Thread of Sky: A Novel by Deanna Fei
Publisher: Penguin; Reprint edition (March 29, 2011)

Publisher's book description: "As Irene Shen’s husband of thirty years was leaving her, she shut the door behind him and said, “Good riddance,” to the eye-rolling of her three daughters. But when he dies suddenly in an accident, her oldest daughter Nora withdraws to her high-powered Wall Street job and troubled relationship; her strong-willed middle child Kay heads to China to discover her family’s heritage; and the youngest, Sophie, a sensitive art student, is trapped at home until college starts.

With her family in pieces, Irene starts organizing a tour of mainland China for her three daughters, her poet sister, and her eighty-year-old mother. As the three generations of women tour China, from the Great Wall to downtown Shanghai, each woman begins to uncover secrets. And slowly find their way toward a new understanding of themselves and each other.

Partly inspired by Deanna Fei’s own travels through China, A THREAD OF SKY is a story about love and sacrifice, history and memory, sisterhood and motherhood, and the connections that endure."

About the Author: Deanna Fei was born in New York, and has lived in Beijing and Shanghai. A graduate of Amherst College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has received a Fulbright grant and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn.

Book Review: Dragon Chica by May-lee Chai

Dragon Chica, a novel by May-lee Chai
Publisher: GemmaMedia; Original edition (October 27, 2010).
Genre: immigrant fiction, YA.
Source: Library.

Comments: Poetic descriptions, excellent characterization, this moving novel incorporates the history of the Cambodian war and atrocities into the story of an immigrant family - a mother and five children- struggling in the U.S. to start a new life, deal with the horrible past of death and loss, and to fit into the American society and way of life. I would give this a very high rating for literary fiction.

 Goodreads book description: "Nea, a Chinese-Cambodian teenager, flees to Texas as a refugee from the Khmer Rouge regime when a miracle occurs. Although her family has been struggling to support itself, they discover that a wealthy aunt and uncle have managed to make it to America as well. Nea and her family rush to join their relatives and help run a Chinese restaurant in Nebraska. But soon Nea discovers their miracle is not what she had expected. Family fights erupt. Then the past – and a forbidden love– threaten to tear them all apart.

Dragon Chica follows Nea, an indomitable character in the tradition of Holden Caulfield, Scout Finch and Jo March, as she fights to save her family and herself."

Read excerpts from the novel at May-Lee Chai's blog. Other reviews: Marjolein Book Blog and  Largehearted Boy.
Challenges: Immigrant Stories Challenge 2011, Chinese Literature Challenge 2011

I Love a Broad Margin to My Life by Maxine Hong Kingston

Teaser Tuesdays asks you to choose two sentences at random from your current read. Identify the author and title for readers.

.... the artists of the chi, mostly women, Chinese
women, were moving, dancing the air/the wind/ energy/life, and getting the world turning.... They played with the chi, drawing circles in the sky, lifting earth to sky, pulling sky
to earth, swirling the controllable universe. Then walked off to do their daily ordinary tasks. (p. 61)

From I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, a verse memoir by Maxine Hong Kingston, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Jan. 18, 2011.

Description from Goodreads: "In her singular voice—humble, elegiac, practical—Maxine Hong Kingston's ....swift, effortlessly flowing verse lines feel instantly natural in this fresh approach to the art of memoir, as she circles from present to past and back, from lunch with a writer friend to the funeral of a Vietnam veteran, from her long marriage (“can’t divorce until we get it right. / Love, that is. Get love right”) to her arrest at a peace march in Washington....

 
On her journeys as writer, peace activist, teacher, and mother, Kingston revisits her most beloved characters: she learns the final fate of her Woman Warrior, and she takes her Tripmaster Monkey, a hip Chinese American, on a journey through China, where he has never been—a trip that becomes a beautiful meditation on the country then and now, on a culture where rice farmers still work in the age-old way, even as a new era is dawning. “All over China,” she writes, “and places where Chinese are, populations / are on the move, going home. That home / where Mother and Father are buried. Doors / between heaven and earth open wide.”
 
Such is the spirit of this wonderful book—a sense of doors opening wide onto an American life of great purpose and joy, and the tonic wisdom of a writer we have come to cherish." (Goodreads)

Book Review: Half Life by Roopa Farooki

Half Life by Roopa Farooki

The novel: Aruna Ahmed Jones decides suddenly to leave her physician husband Patrick and return home to Singapore where her old friend and former lover Ejaz or "Jazz" lives.  In the meantime, in Malaysia, Hari Hassan lays dying in a hospital bed, wanting to reconcile with his son Jazz and even to tell him the truth, finally.

"Jazz," he will write, again, and again, until he is heard, "we need to forgive each other. You need to forgive me. You need to let me go." (p. 18)

My reactions: The stories of Hassan, Aruna, and Jazz intertwine and each chapter returns to events in the characters' lives that have led them to their present situations. Hassan's and Aruna's poignant stories and Jazz's love for Aruna carry us on an emotional journey to face the past and deal with the present. The use of numerous flashbacks in the narrative was distracting, however. I didn't find that the technique worked as well in this novel. The story of Hassan, a very sympathetic character, was not linked to Aruna's story until well into the book, although both stories were told from the beginning in different chapters. But the story, in its entirety, is moving and very worthwhile reading.

About the author: Roopa Farooki is the author of The Corner Shop and Bitter Sweets. Born in Pakistan, she grew up in London, attended new College, Oxford, and teaches creative writing at the Canterbury Christ Church University. She lives in England and France.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Title: Half Life
Author: Roopa Farooki
Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1 edition (April 27, 2010)
Genre: women's fiction
Source: Library

Book Review: Petals from the Sky by Mingmei Yip

Title: Petals From The Sky
Author: Mingmei Yip
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Kensington; 1 edition (March 1, 2010)
Genre: Fiction, Multi-Cultural
Source: Library

Summary: Twenty-year old Meng Ning decides to be come a Buddhist nun, against the wishes of her mother. She travels abroad to study Buddhism and meets a young American doctor at a Buddhist retreat in Hong Kong. They become close and as they say, the rest is history. Or maybe not...Meng Ning must choose between the young doctor and her wish to emulate the life of a Buddhist nun who had influenced her during her childhood. The book takes place in Mainland China, Manhattan, Paris and Hong Kong.

Comments: I learned more about Buddhism from this novel.The story of the Buddhist nun, Yi Kong, Meng Ning's mentor who inspired her to study Buddhism, showed how women fit into the religion. I thought Meng Ning's story could have wrapped up sooner, however. The tension in her relationship between the American doctor Michael Fuller versus Yi Kong her mentor dragged on a little too long, though I enjoyed it as a love story and a story of a young Chinese woman's contact with the life and ideas of the West.

Author biography: Mingmei Yip grew up in Hong Kong and immigrated to the United States in 1992. Her debut novel, Peach Blossom Pavilion, which tells the story of the last in the Chinese tradition of poet-musician-courtesans, was published by Kensington in 2008.

Her new novel, Petals from the Sky, was inspired by Mingmei's life since she befriended powerful Buddhist nuns in her youth and was once groomed to be one.(Amazon)

My rating:  3 1/2 to 4 stars.

Challenges: 100+ Reading Challenge, China Challenge, Support your Local Library Challenge

Book Review: Kitchen Chinese: A Novel about Food, Family, and Finding Yourself by Ann Mah

Kitchen Chinese: A Novel About Food, Family, and Finding Yourself by Ann Mah (Feb. 1, 2010)

Summary: Isabelle Lee is forced to leave her job as an editorial assistant at a swank New York magazine and decides to try her luck in Beijing, where her older sister Claire is practicing law. The two sisters were never very close but Claire invites Isabelle to stay in her spacious modern apartment in Beijing, and helps her get a job as a food writer for an English language magazine, Beijing NOW.

Claire gives her advice on how to interview a famous Chinese film director:Isabelle feels like a fish out of water as she doesn't speak Mandarin well, has no friends in the city, and still feels intimidated by her older sister, the successful Ivy League graduate and lawyer who has fulfilled all their parents' expectations, except one, that is. The sisters feel the pressure of their parents, even in far away Beijing, to marry a Han Chinese and provide grandchildren as soon as possible.

You don't know how I appreciate this, " I say in a rush.
In the car, Claire issues advice while simultaneously checking her BlackBerry, scanning the newspaper, and smoothing on another coat of lipstick. "Just be casual," she says, her voice as instructive as Dear Abby. "Men don't like it when women are too aggressive. Especially Chinese guys."

How the sisters deal with their parents, how Isabelle handles Beijing, her job writing on regional Chinese food,  and the attentions of Jeff, a Chinese rock singer, as well as the interest of a mysterious young American neighbor, Charlie, are the meat of the novel.

Comments: I loved traveling with Isabelle to places in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang to try out different styles of Chinese food. Her descriptions of the different kinds of "hot" in spicy Sechuan food made me want to try mapo tofu, bean curd cooked in hot chili oil. (The recipe is included in the back of the book, along with a few other dishes.)Here Isabelle takes her American friend Julia to breakfast in Hong Kong:

The conversation falters as we nibble dainty dumplings filled with shrimp peeping pale and pink through their translucent wrappers. We dive into plates of soy-sauce-scented rice noodles, unwrap bamboo leaves to reveal triangles of sticky rice....
"The food here is amazing. So fresh!" says Julia, her voice soft with awe. This is the best dimsum I've ever had. Ooh!" she exclaims, flagging down a passing cart. "Chicken feet!"

 I enjoyed Ann Mah's writing and the way she combined setting and regional cuisine in her story of the two Chinese-American sisters. I could relate to demands or expectations of parents, and the sometimes testy relationship between a younger and older sibling - these seem to be universal.

About the author: Ann Mah was born in California and lived in Beijing for four years, working as a dining manager for an English-language magazine. She was awarded a James Beard Culinary Scholarship in 2005 and now lives in Paris.

Challenges: 100+ Reading Challenge, China Challenge, Support your Local Library Challenge
Cym Lowell: Book Review Party Wednesday