Tag Archives: Christian Science Monitor
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
Remember the title of Katherine Boo’s new book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, because you will see it on upcoming nominee lists for the next round of Very Important Literary Prizes. That Boo won the Pulitzer in 2000, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2002, became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 2003 (contributor since 2001) after 10 years with The Washington Post, and is just now publishing her debut title, will guarantee media coverage. That Beautiful is an unforgettable true story, meticulously researched with unblinking honesty, will make Boo’s next awards well-deserved.
From November 2007 to March 2011, Boo became a regular fixture in Annawadi, “the sumpy plug of slum” next to the constantly-modernizing international Mumbai airport, and home to 3,000 inhabitants “packed into, or on top of 355 huts.” Settled in 1991 by Tamil Nadu laborers from southern India hired to repair an airport runway, 21st-century Annawadi sits “where New India collided with old India and made new India late.” Encircling Annawadi are “five extravagant hotels,” luxurious evidence of India’s growing global presence: “’Everything around us is roses,’” describes an Annawadian, “’And we’re the sh*t in between.’” In this fetid microcosm, everyday dramas range from petty jealousies to explosive violence fueled by religion, caste, and gender.
At the center of Boo’s story is garbage trafficker Abdul, the oldest son and prime earner of the 11-member Husain family who comprise almost one-third of Annawadi’s three-dozen Muslim population. Thoughtful, quiet Abdul, who is 16 or 19 – “his parents were hopeless with dates” – his ill father, and his older sister stand accused of beating their crippled neighbor One Leg and setting her on fire. For three years, the family is victimized by a labyrinthine legal system controlled by open palms constantly demanding payment.
Life continues in Annawadi: Asha, a lowly-paid kindergarten teacher, works her growing political connections toward escaping the slum, determined her daughter Manju will become Annawadi’s first college graduate. Manju’s best friend Meena wants something more than to be a trapped, arranged teenage bride: “Everything on television announced a new and better India for women,” but “marrying into a village family was like time-traveling backward.”
The toilet cleaner Mr. Kamble is literally dying to raise enough money for a new heart valve so he can continue to shovel sewage and feed his family. The tiny scavenger-turned-thief Sunil (first introduced to Western readers in Boo’s February 2009 New Yorker article) worries that he will remain forever stunted, but at least he’s not a “baldie” like his taller, younger sister whose rat bites have become “boils [that] erupted with worms.” Meanwhile, thieving Kalu recreates the latest Bollywood films with his talented impersonations, entertaining slum kids who will never witness such marvels themselves.
Mumbai, for its marvelous rebirth, remains the largest city in an India that, in spite of being “an increasingly affluent and powerful nation … still housed one-third of the poverty, and one-quarter of the hunger, on the planet.” With the wealth of India’s top 100-richest equaling almost a quarter of the country’s GDP, today’s gap between top and bottom is virtually unfathomable.
Having built her lauded career on capturing the experiences of those living in some of America’s poorest communities, Boo moves “beyond [her] so-called expertise” to her husband’s country of origin, ready to “compensate for my limitations the same way I do in unfamiliar American territory: by time spent, attention paid, documentation secured, accounts cross-checked.” Once the Annawadians accepted the novelty of her foreign presence, “they went more or less about their business as I chronicled their lives” on the page, on film, on audiotape, in photos.
Throughout such careful documentation, the one element missing – very much to her credit – is Boo herself. Beautiful is by no means a personal memoir; it is not a socioeconomic study on poverty, nor a political treatise on widespread corruption. Beautiful is pure, astonishing reportage with as unbiased a lens as possible about specific individuals who populate a clearly demarcated section of ever-changing Mumbai.
The details of Boo’s process – with a glimpse into her experiences – are added in the “Author’s Note” at book’s end. Further details about Boo follow in “A Conversation with Katherine Boo” conducted by Random House power editor Kate Medina. Before ever “meeting” Kate Boo, readers thoroughly experience Annawadi with Abdul, One Leg, Manju, Sunil, and so many memorable others. Boo’s presence as the silent reporter remains so discreet throughout that she virtually disappears as you journey deeper and deeper, unable to turn away.
Review: Christian Science Monitor, January 26, 2012
Readers: Adult
Published: 2012 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Nonfiction, Indian, Nonethnic-specific
No Biking in the House Without a Helmet by Melissa Fay Greene
You just know that a book’s going to be good if you’ve already guffawed and the type has started to blur (even though you’re trying not to get overly emotional) when you’ve barely even finished the introduction. Welcome to two-time National Book Award finalist Melissa Fay Greene’s latest title, No Biking in the House Without a Helmet.
The premise, so understated, is mind-boggling: “This book is one woman’s musings on the adventures of life with one man and many children.” That “one man” is hubby Don Samuel, who preferred to put the children to bed practicing his closing arguments – as a criminal defense attorney, he spends his days with some of the seedier members of society – over reading the predictable “Berenstain Bears” stories.
As for those “many children,” four are of the “homemade” variety (with birth years ranging from 1981 to 1992), while five more are “foreign-born” and arrived school-aged over the course of another decade, up to the arrival of the last two in 2007. You can do the math: It’s 2011, which means that Greene and Samuel are entering their fourth decade of parenting.
As the first four – Molly, Seth, Lee, and Lily – grew, as children inevitably do, Greene and Samuel, who so loved “the cumbersome richness of life, with children underfoot,” wanted nothing more than for the good times to continue. So, writes Greene, “When the clock started to run down on the home team, we brought in ringers. We figured out how to stay in the game.”
At 42, Greene made her “first-ever appointment with a psychologist” to help her decide whether to have another child. She concluded, without much input from the shrink who “wanted to talk about every sort of unrelated thing,” that the final answer was no.
Then, when Greene was 45, a drugstore kit confirmed that she was pregnant. But she lost the pregnancy and was “overcome with grief and remorse.”
Eventually, at her hubby’s suggestion, she “typed the word ‘adoption’ [into her computer] … stopped grieving and leaned forward, beguiled.”
Given her journalist’s background, Greene first pitched an article to The New Yorker about medical issues related to adoption; she “did not conceal [her] personal interest in the story.” That research led Greene to Bulgaria in 1999 where she found the Greene/Samuels’ fifth child, originally called Christian: “not the perfect moniker for a nice Jewish boy,” the older kids humorously noted, and then renamed him Jesse. Jesse is ethnically Romany; the Romany are also known as Gypsies because (not unlike the way that native Americans came to be erroneously called “Indians”) the Romany were thought to have originated in Egypt when in fact they emigrated from northwest India a thousand years ago. [... click here for more]
Review: Christian Science Monitor, May 5, 2011
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, African, European, Jewish
A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb by Amitava Kumar
If Rip Van Winkle were to read A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb upon waking, he would most likely shake his head and dismiss it as farce.
Alas, you’ll only find this title in the “non-fiction” section of bookstores and libraries; it’s published by an esteemed academic press and written by a respected professor of English at an elite American college. Indeed, “truth is stranger than fiction,” and “you just can’t make this stuff up.” (Although, coincidentally, journalist/novelist/poet/professor Amitava Kumar also had a novel – Nobody Does the Right Thing – published on the same day as Foreigner.)
Novel aside, Foreigner is part contemporary history, part investigative journalism, part political treatise, part memoir – and an absolute must-read. My greatest fear is that the readers who most need to read this book will not.
Kumar is an excellent storyteller. He’s also immensely convincing. Drawing on his vast, voracious knowledge of literature, film, television, and breaking headlines, Kumar makes a case that post-9/11 fear has created a not-so-brave new world of bullies and fools.
Moving fluidly between his adopted U.S. home and his birthplace of India – another country altered by concerns over terrorism – Kumar carefully exposes what he sees as the senseless abuse of power justified by the “war on terror”: “[M]uch of my reportage here is in the service of presenting the anti-terrorism state as the biggest bungler,” Kumar writes in his acknowledgements as he thanks “the non-experts,” “the losers,” and “the small people.”
Kumar first focuses on two ineffectual men, each of whom he classifies as an “accidental terrorist.” He demonstrates in rich detail the ways in which both men were victims of legal entrapment, more guilty of stupidity than actual terrorism, manipulated into crime by others who were mostly concerned with saving themselves in the eyes of an already nervous US government.
The first “accidental terrorist” is Hemant Lakhani, a nearly-70-year-old failed businessman with delusions of grandeur, who was convicted of trying to sell a missile to a would-be terrorist. The missile was a dud, shipped to a New Jersey hotel room by the FBI, and brokered by a “terrorist” who proved to be FBI informant Habib Rehman. Rehman – also a failed businessman – had considerable debts, a self-confessed track record as a liar, and a history of tax evasion. His handsome salary was funded by US taxpayers.
The second terrorist manqué is Shawahar Matin Siraj, a 24-year-old Pakistani American, convicted of conspiring to bomb a NYC subway station. Kumar wryly questions the validity of “prosecut[ing] an individual as a bomber when there is no bomb on the scene.” The lead witness against the unsophisticated Siraj – who is caught on tape insisting on “No killing” and wants to “ask [his] mother’s permission” – was Osama Eldawoody, an Egyptian-born nuclear engineer. Eldawoody was paid $100,000 by the New York Police Department to spy on fellow mosque-goers in Brooklyn and Staten Island. He became an informant via the FBI who literally arrived at his front door because a neighbor reported “suspicious-looking packages on the doorway” (clothing purchased online). The unemployed Eldawoody just “wanted to help.” [... click here for more]
Review: Christian Science Monitor, August 17, 2010
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language by Deborah Fallows
In the book of Exodus in the King James Version of the Bible, Moses first called himself a “stranger in a strange land.” From then on up through Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 novel of the same phrase, the “stranger in a strange land”-genre has been (and remains) a staple of song, film, and literature. That a sense of cultural disconnect has long plagued – and fascinated – humankind.
Centuries ago, Marco Polo could never have imagined he was creating the ‘[western] stranger in a strange land’-niche with his ever-popular travelogues. Ever since the fin-de-siècle socialist capitalism that opened China, westerners are flocking to the seemingly unlimited potential of the ex-pat experience. Linguist Deborah Fallows becomes one of the latest with Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language, an oddly hybrid mix of memoir, history, and cultural study.
Fallows and her husband, The Atlantic’s national correspondent James Fallows, are seasoned ex-pats; Fallows’s introduction describes the “pattern of [their] life” as “alternating several years at home in Washington DC, with several years out exploring the world.” Their first visit to China – recalled merely as “snapshots” – occurred briefly in 1986 while the family (with two then-small children) spent four years living in Japan and Southeast Asia.
Almost a quarter-century later, the couple returned to China when James accepted a three-year Atlantic gig. In spite of Deborah Fallows’s linguistic training and predeparture language classes, “Our entry to China was rough,” she confesses. “I could not recognize or utter a single word of the Chinese … and I even wondered if my teacher had been teaching us Cantonese instead of Mandarin.” (Fallows is careful to explain that “Chinese” is “technically a broader term that covers the family of many different languages and dialects of China.” As Mandarin is China’s official language, she uses the terms “Mandarin” and “Chinese” interchangeably.)
Fallows, of course, tenaciously progresses. In 14 chapters – each titled with a Chinese phrase, its English translation, and a summary remark about said phrase – Fallows charts how the Chinese language “became [her] way of making some sense of China.” In “1. Wo ài ni! I love you! The grammar of romance,” Fallows muses that “[m]aybe love, 爱, is a metaphor for much that is now unfolding and changing in China.” She offers disparate glimpses of the street vendor attracting foreign customers by yelling “I love you!,” the friend who confesses she loves her husband “for now,” and contrasts the commonplace public displays of affection in Beijing’s Yuyuantan Park to the parents who wander Shanghai People’s Park advertising their grown children’s virtues on homemade signs in hopes of arranging marriage.
In “2. When rude is polite,” Fallows observes how bluntness is a sign of closeness and intimacy; her overuse of “pleases” and “thank-yous” in China – expected in the West – actually emphasizes social distance. [...click here for more]
Review: Christian Science Monitor, August 4, 2010
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, Chinese, Nonethnic-specific
The Price of Stones: Building a Stone for My Village by Twesigye Jackson Kaguri with Susan Urbanek Linville
If you’re reading this review, $4 lattes or $15 lunches are probably not shock-inducing numbers. Now think about this: “Two dollars feeds a child for a week…. Fifteen pays for books for a trimester. We can do so much with so little.” With pure gratitude as he begins a meal with students from his Nyaka AIDS Orphans School to celebrate Uganda’s Independence Day, Twesigye Jackson Kaguri states a simple fact. “One of these giggling children might even become the future president of Uganda,” he marvels.
Kaguri dreams big. And not without merit. Presented simply and humbly, Kaguri’s story – and that of the giggling children – debuts this month in his unforgettable memoir, The Price of Stones: Building a School for My Village.
Born and raised in rural Nyakagyezi in southwest Uganda, Kaguri learned the value of education early from his older brother Frank, whose kindness and generosity he idolized. In spite of their father’s disdain, Kaguri excelled at school, eventually joining Columbia University’s Human Rights Advocacy visiting scholars program.
Even as he discovers that “many in New York considered Africa a country, not a continent … [that] all Africans were the same” he also marvels at “the freedom of expression [he] found in America.” He pointedly notes his “amaze[ment] that primary through high school education was free.”
By the time Kaguri journeys home after his American adventure, his beloved brother was dying of AIDS. His oldest sister, then her baby son, rapidly followed. Kaguri returned to the U.S. – and the love of his life; he married Beronda, whom he had met while living in New York, and the couple eventually settled in Michigan.
By 1991, 15 percent of Ugandans were thought to be infected with HIV/AIDS and almost 100,000 Ugandans were dying from the disease every year. All around, families were disintegrating: in a population of 31 million, over 2.2 million children have lost one or both parents to AIDS.
This lost generation of orphans becomes the focus of Kaguri’s life work. On his first trip home as a married man in April 2001, Kaguri cannot turn orphans away: “Because of the stigma of AIDS, many children are abandoned…. [F]amilies take the parents’ property and use the orphans as household servants or hire them out as prostitutes.” Kaguri realizes only education can help these children escape destitution and servitude. Beronda recognizes the immediacy of the situation: “‘These children don’t have time,’ she said. ‘They need a school now.’”
The heartwarming journey from dream to reality is filled with tremendous challenges, utter faith, and Social Security check donations: “This is the true price of stones.” On Jan. 2, 2003, Nyaka AIDS Orphans School officially opened with 60 students – all orphans – receiving free education, including free books, uniforms, health care, and food. A birthday cake – not a tradition in Uganda – was presented to the students “to symbolize their passage from orphans to students.” Each wore purple-and-white uniforms, “because [purple] symbolizes happiness.” The school motto proclaims, “’For Our Children’s Sake.’” [... click here for more]
Review: Christian Science Monitor, June 8, 2010
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Memoir, African
It Is Well with My Soul: The Extraordinary Life of a 106-Year-Old Woman by Ella Mae Johnson with Patricia Mulcahy
“Some of the things in this book happened a hundred years ago…. I never anticipated having to remember all this,” says Ella Mae Cheeks Johnson as she opens her memoir, It Is Well with My Soul: The Extraordinary Life of a 106-Year-Old Woman, written with Patricia Mulcahy. Über-centenarian Johnson recalled more than most people half her age. Sadly, her readers can’t expect a sequel to her delightfully plain-spoken memoir as she passed away on March 22. (The memoir’s original publication date in May was quickly pushed up, making the book available now.)
Born Jan. 13, 1904, in Dallas at a time when “black citizens had no official papers,” Johnson was raised by her next-door neighbors, the Davis family, after the death of her mother. “Everything in the Davis environment left me certain I was loved,” she writes.
Yet despite a nurturing home environment, in many ways Johnson’s early years were harsh ones. Growing up poor but never needy, she couldn’t escape the helpless humiliation faced by “blacks, or Negroes, or colored people, or whatever they called us.” She watched as “some things were out of Papa’s control,” how adults “had to lie in order to survive,” and the “many ways in which we were put in our place in the Jim Crow South.”
Johnson graduated salutatorian to her valedictorian best friend from Dallas Colored High School and, in 1921, entered Fisk University, a historically African- American college in Tennessee. During an art class in her senior year, Johnson painted a copy of a picture based on the biblical story of the “The Good Samaritan”: “My entire life has been driven by my emotional and spiritual response to the picture, and the message of compassion it communicates,” she writes.
Johnson finished Fisk six months later than anticipated because she missed a semester participating in a college-wide boycott orchestrated by legendary Fisk graduate W.E.B. Du Bois who “agitate[d] for the rights of his people, whatever they wanted to call us – Negro, colored, black.” Lest you think Johnson a lemming, even in a clear battle for civil rights, she feistily adds, “I don’t follow just because someone else decides to lead.”
After working briefly for the Congregational Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, Johnson arrived in Ohio – where she would live the rest of her life – as one of only two minority students admitted each year at Western Reserve University’s School of Applied Social Science. Decades later, the school was renamed Case Western Reserve University, and Johnson was recognized (until her recent death) as the oldest living African-American graduate of CWRU. … [click here for more]
Review: Christian Science Monitor, April 2, 2010
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin
Before I even finished the book, I had already preordered multiple copies of Gretchen Rubin’s latest title, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun. Which means if you’re looking for an enlightening, laugh-aloud read, get the book and forget the rest of this review. If you need more convincing, let me count the monthly ways….
Gretchen Rubin already had a pretty good life. She’s married to the man of her dreams, has two “delightful” daughters, is a bestselling author with a Yale law degree, is healthy, and lives in her favorite city surrounded by supportive family and friends. But she’s also prone to misbehavior that undermines her well-being: she loses her temper over trivial things, and fights melancholy and insecurity, not to mention that unshakable guilt.
One morning on a city bus, Rubin had a startling epiphany: “I was suffering from midlife malaise – a recurrent sense of discontent and almost a feeling of disbelief … ‘Is this really it?’” Asking herself what she really wanted, her answer seemed simple: “I want to be happy.” Like most of us, she “had never thought about what made [her] happy or how [she] might be happier.” But unlike most of us, she actually figured out how: “I decided to dedicate a year to trying to be happier.” And she gives the rest of us great hope because she did so without making radical changes like running off to Indonesia. Rubin assures us, “I wanted to change my life without changing my life, by finding more happiness in my own kitchen.”
First she planned and prepared. She compiled her own “Twelve Commandments,” which begins with the all-important “Be Gretchen,” and her “goofier list” of “Secrets of Adulthood,” which includes tried-and-tested gems like, “By doing a little bit each day, you can get a lot accomplished,” and Luddite-loving zingers like, “Turning the computer on and off a few times often fixes glitches.”
Armed and ready, Rubin set off on her year-long journey. Superbly organized into amusing step-by-step months, Happiness Project is a definite success – just reading it will make you happier. Rubin manages to offer plausible, solid suggestions for what worked for her; she’s great at navigating that delicate line between “just do this,” and “you might want to try that.” As self-help books go, Rubin’s works because it’s filled with open, honest glimpses into her real life, woven together with constant doses of humor. She begins the year boosting her energy to be better prepared for the next 11 months: In January, she sleeps more, exercises better, and cleans out her closets. February is spent working on her marriage: She vows to nag less, fight right, and “not to eat a half pound of M&Ms on an empty stomach.” …[click here for more]
Review: Christian Science Monitor, January 7, 2010
Readers: Adult
Published: 2009 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, Nonethnic-specific
Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka by Adele Barker
Three weeks after 9/11, University of Arizona professor Adele Barker arrived in Sri Lanka as a senior Fulbright Scholar to teach Russian literature, feminist literary theory, and American literature to select students at the University of Peradeniya. But her own education about the history and people of the island nation takes center page in her latest title, Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka.
With centuries’ worth of visitors – “[s]ome were blown off course; some came for the spices; some to conquer and rule; some, much later, simply to sunbathe” – much of Sri Lanka’s history can be summarized in its names given by foreigners: the Roman Taprobane, the Arab Serendib, the Portuguese Ceilao, the Dutch Ceylan, the British Ceylon, and finally “[i]n 1972, the people who actually live on this island reclaimed the name Sri Lanka.”
Settling into a sprawling home in Kandy with her teenage son, Barker initially insists, “I didn’t want people who are darker than me fixing our meals and cleaning for us.” With her landlord’s gentle prodding, however, she realizes that not employing the locals is more damaging to the tenuous economy than upholding her anticolonialist principles. With its Sinhalese owners, Tamil caretaker, and ever-changing international visitors, Barker’s guesthouse compound is an oasis amid the “civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil Tiger rebels … [that] had already been raging since 1983” and claimed 40,000 lives by 2001. But beyond the walls are daily reminders of war, from grenades to riots to murders. Sri Lanka, Barker learns, is a land of paradox: the endless violence “against the backdrop of something whose beauty is heart-stopping.”
In spite of perpetual conflict, Barker observes that she has never lived “with such a hybrid mix” of Sinhalese, Tamils, Burghers of Dutch and Portuguese ancestry, Moors, and Malays. Surprisingly, religion – Sri Lanka is majority Buddhist – “has never been a factor in this war.”
Barker’s academic year passes quickly and she leaves with gihin ennam, a Sinhalese parting used “‘when you are saying good-bye but know you’ll be back.’” While her first trip was marked by 9/11, her second, three years later in October 2005, follows the devastating Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami that claimed 30,000 Sri Lankan lives: “I needed to see things for myself.” As she travels through refugee camps, Barker witnesses the disturbing results of “competitive charity,” a term coined by a foreign aid worker, referring to international organizations with too much funding, working without enough understanding of local needs. While Barker’s first trip focused on the experiences of the southern Sri Lankans, Barker is determined to “find the balance” in the Tamil north, home of the Tamil Tigers, a group labeled by the United States as a terrorist organization. “Suicide missions are part of the ethos of this organization,” Barker learns, and near-daily violence is simply unavoidable. Resigned survival is the only goal. … [click here for more]
Review: Christian Science Monitor, December 30, 2009
Readers: Adult
Published: 2009 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, Nonethnic-specific, Sri Lankan
Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship by Denise Chong
Denise Chong has built an award-winning career capturing ordinary people living extraordinary lives. The Concubine’s Children (1994) told of her own family’s fractured journey from China to Canada and The Girl in the Picture (2000) detailed the harrowing story of the young girl whose screaming, naked image became a devastating symbol of the Vietnam War.
In her latest book, Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship, Chong bears witness to the life of a Chinese bus mechanic who risked everything in an effort to change his country’s repressive regime.
On June 4, 2009, three friends – Lu Decheng, Yu Zhijian, and Yu Dongyue – were reunited in Washington, DC, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. All three had spent the majority of the past two decades in scattered prisons, united by a single pledge to each another: “I must leave this prison alive and with my sanity.” Those of us fortunate enough to live in a free country can hardly comprehend that throwing paint-filled eggs on a poster could result in endless years of subhuman imprisonment.
Part biography, part history, part testimony, Egg on Mao closely follows the story of Lu Decheng, one of the three reunited friends. Chong weaves together several narrative strands: Lu’s early life in his riverside village in Hunan Province (modestly famous as the birthplace of fireworks); his fateful act of political protest during a pivotal moment in modern history that traps him in the Chinese prison system; and his subsequent survival and release, with his humanity somehow intact.
Growing up under a crushing Communist system that remained unchallenged even after Mao’s 1976 death, Lu was mostly raised by his beloved grandmother. Officially classified as a “martyr’s widow,” which accorded her certain privileges under the fickle regime, Grandmother Lu repeatedly emphasized the need for people to maintain the ability to “think for themselves.” Her dangerous but truthful talk of high-ranking thievery, deceit, and execution shaped Lu’s defiant views. …[click here for more]
Review: Christian Science Monitor, October 21, 2009
Readers: Adult
Published: 2009 Continue reading
The Piano Teacher by Janice Y.K. Lee
Something about Janice Y.K. Lee’s debut novel, The Piano Teacher, whispers, “Watch me.”
Populated with a cast of “wandering global voyagers,” Lee unfurls her story, set in Hong Kong during and after World War II, layer by layer and in cinematic snippets. Captured in clipped, almost abbreviated language, The Piano Teacher paints vivid pictures in quick strokes.
Lee, who is of Korean heritage, was born and raised in Hong Kong and educated at Harvard. She writes with a director’s eye. Her timing is ingenious and controlled, and she knows exactly how much she’s willing to reveal from one moment to the next.
The eponymous piano teacher is Claire Pendleton, a newly arrived émigré and the provincial young wife of a British government engineer whom she married “to escape the dark interior of her house, her bitter mother.” She arrives in 1952 Hong Kong with myriad preconceived notions about the “unscrupulous, conniving” locals. But the city is nothing as she expected and she finds herself especially wide-eyed over the affluent Chinese, “the ones who seemed English in all but their skin color…. She hadn’t known that such worlds existed.” …[click here for more]
Reviews: Christian Science Monitor, January 31, 2009
Readers: Adult
Published: 2009 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, British, Chinese, Hapa, Korean American
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