Tag Archives: Colonialism
Bamboo People by Mitali Perkins
Inspired by three years of living in Thailand with her family and visiting refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border, Mitali Perkins’ latest novel follows the lives of two boys on opposite sides of a war they have inherited.
City-educated Chiko feels compelled to apply for a government teaching position in hopes of supporting his mother while the two wait for news of his doctor father who has been imprisoned for resisting the Burmese government. When he goes to city hall to apply, he’s abducted with other young boys and taken far into the mountains to be trained as a soldier. Chiko’s academic lifestyle has not prepared him for the physical challenges of fighting life, but he makes quick friends with homeless orphan boy Tai whose street smarts just might save them both …
Tu Reh takes over the story’s narration midway through, as he must decide the fate of the seriously injured Chiko. Tu Reh is a Karenni boy soldier, a member of one of the many ethnic tribes that challenge the rule of the corrupt Burmese government. Out for his first mission with his hero father, the group finds Chiko is the only survivor of a mine blast. Tu Reh’s father quickly bandages Chiko, then puts his fate into his son’s hands – take him to the nearby healer and save his life, or leave him to die.
Both Chiko and Tu Reh are mere boys, learning as best as they can amidst inhuman, unjust conditions not of their making. But somehow, someone has instilled them with morals and goodness strong enough to counter the fighting and hatred, regardless of the imminent threat to kill or be killed … indeed, while these children have inherited war, they’re the only hope of somehow, someday ending the violence.
Perkins adds a pertinent end chapter, “About Modern Burma,” which warns of the unfortunate situation of the majority of the Karenni people even now. In her “Author’s Note,” she wisely asks her readers the toughest questions, “What would you do if your mother was hungry and your only option to feed her was to fight in the army? What if you saw soldiers burning your home and farm while you ran for your life?” In spite of such tragic, horrifying experiences, both Chiko and Tu Reh manage to find their human spirit beyond vengeful reactions … others in Perkins’ story certainly do not. She gently but encouragingly offers resources to those who “want to promote peace and democracy in Burma or help refugees fleeing from that country” at www.bamboopeople.org.
Read Chiko’s and Tu Reh’s story. Learn how young Nya Meh learned to forgive the worst atrocities a young girl could ever face and chose instead to heal others. And how Chiko’s father never forgot the kindness of his childhood Karenni friend. And how grandfather implores the hot-headed others, “If we give way to hatred, we won’t be any better than our enemies.”
Join in. Let peace start today, one reader at a time …
To check out Mitali Perkins’ many other titles on BookDragon, click here.
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Fiction, Burmese, Indian American
Migritude by Shailja Patel
Given the sheer number of books that arrive in the mailbox, I rarely pick up a title and start reading immediately. But something about Migritude (debuting from fabulous indie publisher Kaya Press: ‘Smokin’ Hot Books’!!) demanded ‘read me NOW!’ Once opened, I could hardly put it down.
Shailja Patel defies easy check-it boxes. She’s not quite African because even after multiple generations in Kenya where she was born and raised, ‘brown’ people can’t feel safe as they watch their Ugandan neighbors violently expelled during Idi Amin’s reign of terror. She’s not at all Indian as she’s never lived there in spite of Gujarati relatives. She’s definitely not British in spite of her UK college education. And she’s not quite American as real Americans are never made to wait a frightening four hours for parents to emerge through customs after they have been held without cause.
Her artist’s life, too, is not easily defined. She’s a poet, storyteller, performance artist, activist … and her first book reflects her hybrid, morphing creativity: ”A battered red suitcase holds my trousseau – 18 saris collected by my mother, to give to me when I married,” Patel begins. “Migritude is the mantra that unlocks the suitcase, releases the stories.” She’s a peripatetic migrant with attitude to spare … welcome to Patel’s unique Migritude.
Those once hidden stories debuted to live audiences in 2006 and became a globe-trotting performance that combines the price of colonial history, family chronicles, mother/daughter exchanges, personal journey, and voices of women from around the world who dared speak out. From the imperialist commodification of Kashmiri into cashmere, mosuleen into muslin, ambi into paisley, the rebirth of chai as “a beverage invented in California,” Patel breaks open violent, destructive history, both distant and far too near.
To her performance recorded in ink and paper comprising the book’s first quarter, Patel adds a companion “Shadow Book,” which she describes as “an extended debrief with an old friend: an accounting of behind-the-scenes and after-the-fact stories, memories, and associations … to illuminate Migritude by offering context.”
In the third section, Patel includes the “poems [that] are the soil in which Migritude germinated” – from “What We Keep” that gives voice to a fragile elderly aunt teaching her to make “good puris,” to “Eater of Death” in which a desperate Afghani mother mourns her husband and seven children murdered by American bombs.
In the final, shortest section, Patel includes an “idiosyncratic” chronology of political and personal history, and ends with two interviews because “[a] good interview, like a good poem, throws up surprises and discoveries for its participant as well as for its readers.”
Lucky readers are certainly in for ‘surprises and discoveries’ here. Close the book and your first reaction most likely will be ‘I WANT TO SEE!’ Stay tuned: her skeletal website as of this writing is still under construction, but surely a tour schedule will be included … see you at the theater!
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Sky Train: Tibetan Women on the Edge of History by Canyon Sam, foreword by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama
Last night, six of my book hens (my mother likes to refer to my book club as “the chicken coop,” which has an amusing ring to it in Korean: “kkoh-kkoh-jang”) got together for a lively discussion of Canyon Sam‘s debut, Sky Train. Even though I usually play dictator in naming the book, this one was chosen because two of the hens requested a title on contemporary Tibet … plus Sam is scheduled to come to the Smithsonian this fall (stay tuned for details!).
Sky Train was 20 years in the making for third-generation Chinese American Sam. The book went through multiple revisions, eventually whittled down from an original 36 interviews gathered over numerous trips to Tibet, China, and India, which shrunk in number to 16, then 12, then 9, to the four contained here.
Sam’s final four are phenomenal women: Mrs. Paljorkhyimsar, who was left behind by her husband who chose to escort a religious leader to safety over his own family, who survived 22 years of death-defying separation in horrific labor camps before being reunited with her family in Switzerland; Mrs. Namseling who began her adult life as the teenage bride of a much older government official, who spent nine years in prison for her lofty position, and was only released to save face when her son-in-law, the prince of Gangtok (today, the capital of India’s last state, Sikkim), arrived on royal visit; Mrs. Taring who became a major advocate for orphan children and education of the Tibetan diaspora in India; and Sonam Choedron who, in spite of the years of suffering and deprivation she survived in unlawful prisons, somehow was able to forgive the man who murdered her son, who asked for nothing more than her son’s driver’s license as that was the only picture she would have of him because all her family pictures had been previously been destroyed by Chinese security officials. Indeed, the true story of Tibet proves to be testimony to the immense suffering and even greater strength of Tibetan women.
As much as Sky Train gives voice to Tibet’s memorable women, it is as much – if not more so – Sam’s own life journey towards acceptance and ultimately forgiveness. “A Jewish woman commented years ago that my going to China for a year and coming back a Tibetan advocate was like her going to Israel for a year and coming back a Palestinian supporter,” Sam writes. “I didn’t see it that way. I had felt little affinity for China before I’d first visited.”
That first visit to Sam’s ancestral homeland left Sam “[o]utraged and saddened.” Indeed, the problematic history between China and Tibet is violent, vicious, tragic. China invaded Tibet in 1950, and the 14th Dalai Lama fled to India on March 10, 1959, which is commemorated annually as National Uprising Day. Tibetans were forced to scatter, and those who remained were trapped in cycles of indescribable brutality, genocide, labor camps, and decades of pervasive injustice. Subjugation continues today. The opening of the eponymous “sky train” now irreversibly links Tibet to China.
Sam takes us along on her own Sky Train voyage, sharing her palpable disappointment trying to get an uninterrupted shot of a once open skyline of natural wonders, her joyful if bittersweet reunion with the Tibetan family she calls her own in a chaotically transformed Lhasa she no longer recognizes, her ongoing search for the women who will finally allow her to finish her book, and eventually her own path towards her own brand of enlightenment. “Clean your heart. Keep the vision. ‘Tibet’ is a state of mind.”
Tidbit: This just in on September 21, 2010 … Canyon Sam just won PEN Prize’s annual Open Book Award, honoring books by writers of color. Whooo hoooo!!!
Readers: Adult
Published: 2009 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, Chinese American, Tibetan
Facts for Visitors: Poems by Srikanth Reddy
Confession: I got to hang out twice with Srikanth – otherwise known as “Chicu” – Reddy two days in a row last weekend, first for the Asian American Literary Review‘s “8: A Symposium,” and then for an Amnesty International Human Rights Art Festival literary panel. Even though my little brain is not so good with poetry, having Reddy actually read his to me (and the rest of the audience) helped immensely.
Given its title, Reddy joked that his collection often gets misshelved in the “Travel” section of bookstores. While that might mean his potential readers will need to do a bit of sleuthing to find the title, that sense of misplaced, disjointed distancing is not far from what Reddy explores with poignancy – and moments of sly humor – in his debut collection.
Written mostly while living abroad, the poems in Facts play with – even ‘corrupt,’ as Reddy comments – the accepted meanings of words, even language. From psalms to fairy tales, Reddy challenges that which was once familiar: in “Corruption,” his “words … remove themselves from expectation,” and then again at collection’s end in “Corruption (II),” he predicts that “our tongue will have crossed into extinction or changed utterly.”
In one of his longer pieces, “Fundamentals of Esperanto,” Reddy cleverly combines facts and fiction-disguised-as-facts to create a brand-new, albeit unreliable (though shrewdly entertainingly), history of the utopic language of Esperanto which was created in hopes of creating a worldwide accessible means of communication.
But language – any and all languages – are always in transition, a “mutating patois,” Reddy writes. Each of us struggles to communicate, to connect … not unlike visitors to faraway lands searching for the very ‘facts’ that will somehow bridge the wordless gaps.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2004 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Poetry, Indian American, South Asian American
Map of the Invisible World by Tash Aw
Five years ago, Taipei-born Malaysian British Tash Aw landed in the media spotlight with The Harmony Silk Factory, complete with public speculations about an allegedly enormous debut advance. Decorated with multiple important prizes, including Commonwealth and Whitbread first novel awards, Aw’s Factory earned him both fortune and fame.
Last May, Aw’s sophomore effort, Map of the Invisible World, arrived on British shelves, but took another eight months to cross the Pond. Without a doubt, as lauded as Aw’s debut was, Map is even better.
At its core, Map is a story about a family in search of home. Set mostly in Indonesia in 1964 during a tumultuous “Vivere Pericoloso … Year of Living Dangerously” as named by then-President Sukarno in his Indonesian Independence Day speech, the two-member de Willigen family comprised of father Karl and son Adam is torn apart by race and politics.
Although Indonesia declared independence in August 1945 after centuries of Dutch colonialism followed by Japanese occupation during World War II, the Netherlands did not acknowledge Indonesia’s sovereignty until 1949. Decades of turbulent transition followed for Indonesia’s citizens – both native and naturalized.
Born on a remote Indonesian island to Dutch parents, Karl desperately wishes (and almost believes) that he was his hired wet-nurse’s half-Indonesian son. His need to belong to the only home he’s ever known manifests in his longing for an Indonesian family: “’I want to have an Indonesian child. A boy. He’ll be my alter ego, except better, and happier.’”
Years later, Karl’s adoption of five-year-old native orphan Adam completes the de Willigen family. But for Adam, a new father means he must acknowledge he has forever lost his only other family, an older brother Johan he “cannot remember the slightest thing about … not even his face.”
“’My name is Adam and I have no surname,’” he used to announce to detach himself, but he eventually accepts that his “Present Life” permanently includes Karl. In their idyllic house by the sea on the “lost island” of Nusa Perdo, he settles into his new identity as Adam de Willigen, which “sounds just right.”
Refusing to acknowledge the growing xenophobia, Karl and Adam are caught unawares when Karl becomes one of thousands of Dutch Indonesians rounded up for forceful expulsion. One day, soldiers simply take Karl away – “no violence, hardly any drama” – as 16-year-old Adam helplessly watches.
Ten days later, Adam tracks down Margaret Bates, an Indonesian-born, U.S.-national, university professor long domiciled in Jakarta. Hers is the only name he finds repeated in his father’s personal papers and photos. “’I wasn’t prying, you understand, I was just looking for clues. I need to find my father,’” he explains to a bewildered Margaret.
And thus the search begins. Driven by decades-old memories of her 15-year-old-self, Margaret calls on an overly-complacent Australian journalist friend and an untrustworthy U.S. Embassy official in her desperate quest to find Karl – whom she finally admits to be her long lost love.
In the big city for the first time, Adam falls victim to Margaret’s enigmatic graduate student, Din, who hopes to one day write “a secret history of the Indonesian Islands … a history of our country written by an Indonesian.” His militant patriotism both repulses and fascinates wide-eyed Adam, while his promises to help Adam find his brother Johan lead the teenager towards grave danger.
With controlled elegance, Aw lays out a multi-layered puzzle whose pieces create a haunting portrait of a splintered family working towards reunion. The militant Din tells Margaret of his visions of a “lost world where everything remained true and authentic, away from the gaze of foreigners – a kind of invisible world, almost.” Din unmistakably refers to an Indonesia untouched, certainly uncontrolled by western colonialism.
Ironically, Din’s ‘lost world’ points specifically to the southeastern Indonesian islands, which include Buru where Karl was born, and the fictional Perdo where Karl has chosen to build his adult home. Only in Din’s lost world – which Karl refers to again and again as “paradise” – can Karl and Adam be ‘true and authentic’ as father and son. But their Edenic existence proves fleeting, and both Karl and Adam are separately cast out.
“Home was not necessarily where you were born, or even where you grew up, but something else entirely, something fragile that could exist anywhere in the world.” For Adam, home must be with Karl, with new hopes of being joined someday by Johan and even Margaret. To get there, these unlikely individuals must move beyond history, politics, skin color, barriers, and background … and find their way together, somewhere on that map of the invisible world.
Review: The Bloomsbury Review, Spring 2010
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, British Asian, Malaysian
Leaving Tangier by Tahar Ben Jelloun, translated by Linda Coverdale
In spite of his prestigious college degree which should have guaranteed him a bright future, Azel is unable to find meaningful work in his native Tangier, a city in northern Morocco. Mired in self-absorbed disappointment, he spends his days and nights lost in women, wine, and song, living off the hard earnings of his older sister, Kenza. When he meets Miguel, a wealthy Spaniard, Azel recognizes a chance for escape. Although he adamantly denies being a homosexual, Azel nevertheless allows Miguel to buy him a luxurious new life in Barcelona.
Azel’s sister Kenza soon follows as Miguel’s legal “wife,” but insists on remaining independent. Unable to come to terms with his exploited sexuality – not to mention his dissolute existence – Azel falls victim to his own sense of trapped failure.
Already a bestseller in France where it was first published (Jelloun is a Moroccan transplant who immigrated to France in 1961), Leaving adroitly explores the complicated issues of immigration, contrasting two cultures separated merely by the few miles of the Straits of Gibraltar, and yet so vastly distanced by socio-economic differences.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2009 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Translation, Arab, European, Moroccan
The Naked Eye by Yoko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky
Every time I read a Yoko Tawada title, I almost want to go finish my almost-ABD PhD (in post-war German and Japanese literatures). Sadly, I recently got the news that my advisor/mentor passed away, so going back would be impossible without him; even though I didn’t see him enough after I left, I was always comforted knowing he was there in that Ivory Tower … as my husband said when I shared the news, “well, now he’s everywhere in the ether around you, and you can talk to him anytime.” I suppose having ongoing chats about Tawada with him makes me miss him less – she certainly provides plenty to talk about …
The Naked Eye is Tawada’s first novel available in English; Tawada writes in both Japanese (her native language) and German (her adopted tongue) and has won top literary prizes in both languages. The book’s translator notes about Naked, “She started the novel in German, but then parts of the story began occurring to her in Japanese, and so she continued writing sections of the book now in one language, now in the other, later translating in both directions until she arrived sumltaneously at two complete manuscripts.”
Language always looms large in Tawada’s works, and this one is no different. The young protagonist in Naked both struggles with language and resists learning the words that surround her. She is a Vietnamese high school student who arrives in East Berlin to deliver a paper at an international conference. Already she is linguistically and culturally displaced. She meets a West German university student, inadvertently gets drunk with him the first night of her visit, and wakes up virtually his prisoner in his far away hometown. Stripped of language, culture, and family, she remains trapped with him until she just walks out one day, gets on a passing train hoping to get to Moscow from where she might finally return home, but ends up in Paris, culturally and linguistically displaced yet again. Befriended by a series of strangers, she spends over a decade in limbo – watching Catherine Deneuve films over and over again – losing more and more of her identity along the way.
That’s the basic story of what happens. Or so it seems. But really, Tawada’s novel has a whole other dimension that is mind-boggling in its cleverness – and I’m sure my PhD-deprived brain is too untrained at this late stage to have understood it all, but what a fantastic challenge to just try! Every chapter is the name of a Catherine Deneuve film – and every chapter shares elements with their respective film’s plots. To our non-French speaking Vietnamese illegal immigrant, Catherine Deneuve, in her various celluloid incarnations, becomes both her obsession and her teacher. Even as she does not speak the film’s language, she watches the films multiple times, gaining new understanding with each repetitive viewing. With each screening, Catherine the actress becomes more real and her filmic world that much more understandable, while the young Vietnamese girl literally fades further and further.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2009 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Translation, European, Japanese, Vietnamese
Once the Shore: Stories by Paul Yoon
I have to say it: ‘Yoon’ rhymes with ‘swoon’ for a reason! … and now on with the published review …
In the author interview that arrived with the galley for Paul Yoon’s first book, Once the Shore, he confesses: “I did very little research – I used a handful of sources that I happened to read, most of them by chance, as jumping-off points for the stories (noted at the end of the book) – but once the stories began to progress I let my imagination roam.”
So persuasive are Yoon’s powers of invention that I went searching for his Solla Island somewhere off the mainland of South Korea – not realizing that it exists only in this breathtaking collection of eight interlinked stories. Yoon, a New York City-born Korean American, writes with such sparse precision as to create a visceral portrait of lost souls, each searching in worlds both living and dead.
The collection opens with the title story, “Once the Shore,” rightfully chosen for inclusion in “Best American Short Stories 2006.” An American widow has arrived at a posh resort on remote Solla, mysterious to the staff as a foreigner in such a faraway location. She develops a quiet friendship with one of the young waiters, good-naturedly called “Jim,” short for Jiminy, as in Cricket, from Disney’s “Pinocchio,” named by the other waiters who insist their youngest colleague resembles the cartoon: “thin limbs and a round head with big, wide dark eyes. A smile as magnificent as a quarter-moon.”
While Jim serves the widow, she reveals piecemeal the story of her late husband, who served in the Pacific, and their years of separation while he was stationed on Solla Island. She shares her husband’s sweet, though unreliable, stories of how he had memorialized their relationship in a cave somewhere on the coast, where “he inscribed his initials and hers and drew a heart around it.”
By listening, by responding to the widow’s memories, Jim is able to temporarily escape his own tragic narrative, in which his beloved older brother, a tuna fisherman, is declared dead, “killed when a United States submarine divided the Pacific Ocean for a moment as it surfaced, causing a crater of cloudy water to bloom, the nose of this great creature gasping for air.”
Both characters, the widow nearing the end of her life and the young Jim just coming into full adulthood, are searching for a seemingly impossible closure with their missing loved ones. In a gorgeous moment initially orchestrated by Jim and completed by the widow, the story ends with a quiet gasp in surreal, yet utterly satisfying beauty….[click here for more]
Reviews: San Francisco Chronicle, April 27, 2009
Readers: Adults
Published: 2009 Continue reading
Filed under ...Absolute Favorites, ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Short Stories, Korean, Korean American
Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie
Even though it’s only April (and the book doesn’t even hit stands until next month), I’m announcing with absolute certainty that Burnt Shadows gets my unwavering vote as THE Book of the Year. I’ll only be too happy to eat my words because that can only mean more great future reads, but I’m not holding my breath that another title will unseat Shamsie’s latest novel anytime soon.
Imagine the literary accomplishment – such poetic audacity, even! – of recounting one couple’s impulsive decision to wed, her conversion to Islam, their mosque-blessed union, their first-ever lovemaking in the warm falling rain, and their return to the house they left in such a flurry just a few hours earlier, juxtaposed line by repetitive line of how many times (17) the husband-half of the other couple voices aloud to his waiting wife, “Where do you think they are?”
Or how about the heartbreaking irony of capturing the custom in one farming village in Afghanistan – at least before war decimated the once fertile country – that a boy is recognized to be a man when his growing hand can finally hold a pomegranate in its entirety within … and yet even before that hand is large enough to hold the ripened sweet fruit, it already knows too well how to hold and fire an AK-47 without remorse.
The book is filled with such moments of beauty and desperation, of joyful anticipation and the most horrific inhumanity. It’s a story of three generations of two intertwined families, each of the family members inhabiting, discarding, and adapting to a vastly international cross-section of histories and cultures.
In Nagasaki just on the eve of the end of World War II, Hiroko Tanaka has lovingly agreed to marry Konrad Weiss, a German ex-pat intellectual now reviled by the same community that once welcomed him as an equal ally. Too soon Nagasaki becomes a symbol of great sacrifice where lives must be destroyed in seconds, ironically for the sake of future peace. Hiroko survives, but is marked forever by bird-shaped shadows of death – the design of the kimono she was wearing that is literally burnt onto her back in the instant the second atom bomb detonated.
She travels to India, where she might find, amazingly enough, the only connection to her former life. She arrives in Delhi at the home of Konrad’s older half-sister and her British husband, a privileged representative of the British Raj, now waiting for Partition which will send them all ‘home.’ There the initial contact between these two disparate families is cemented …. and more than half a century later, in the heated aftermath of 9/11, their three-generation relationship will have to face some of the most heartbreaking man-made consequences once again.
Burnt Shadows is one of those books that the less you know about, the more you’ll appreciate as you discover its intricacies on your own. So I shall not include spoilers here. I’ll just be the one to insist you must absolutely read this book! Lucky for us that most book sites let you pre-order: QUICK, open a new window and reserve your copy NOW.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2009 Continue reading
Filed under ...Absolute Favorites, ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, Afghan, British, British Asian, Indian, Japanese, Pakistani, South Asian
The Weight of Heaven by Thrity Umrigar
Frank and Ellie Benton have had the unthinkable happen to them: their precious 7-year-old son has died of a sudden illness. Even while Ellie is wracked with guilt, Frank blames her for what he believes was her negligence in not taking him to the hospital quickly enough. Their once perfect love story erodes irrepably, and in a desperate effort to forget and escape, Frank takes the opportunity for a fresh start and moves the couple to a small town in India to work for a division of his American employer there.
Almost immediately, Frank develops a special relationship with the bright, promising 9-year-old son of the couple’s uneducated house servants. His management job challenges him culturally – and morally. Ellie goes to work for a local organization that empowers women and finds a welcoming community. But their new life is not balm enough for their overwhelming grief and their emotional estrangement threatens to destroy what’s left of their relationship forever.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2009 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, Indian, Indian American, South Asian, South Asian American
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