Tag Archives: Refugees

November 27, 2012 · 8:40 am

Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad by Melanie Kirkpatrick

Please allow me to share a so-called North Korean political joke: “Kim Jong Il and Vladimir Putin … decide to … see whose bodyguards are more loyal. Putin calls his bodyguard Ivan, opens the window of their twentieth-floor meeting room, and says: ‘Ivan, jump!’ Sobbing, Ivan says: ‘Mr. President, how can you ask me to do that? I have a wife and child waiting for me at home.’ Putin … apologizes to Ivan, and sends him away…. Kim Jong Il … calls his bodyguard…. ‘Lee Myung-man, jump!’…. Lee … is just about to jump … when Putin grabs him and says: ‘… If you jump out this window, you’ll die!…’ Lee … tries to escape Putin’s embrace and jump…: ‘President Putin, please let me go! I have a wife and child waiting for me at home!’”

Ghastly humor aside, the tragic joke barely disguises the inhumane policies of the world’s most secretive, repressive regime. In Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad, former Wall Street Journal journalist Melanie Kirkpatrick documents the desperate, dangerous flight of North Koreans toward an uncertain new life. Drawing parallels with American slaves seeking freedom 150 years and continents apart, Kirkpatrick traces North Korean journeys through a network of clandestine routes, safe houses, and courageous individuals willing to compromise their own safety to help others.

For North Koreans attempting to escape starvation, torture, repression, and worse, the “new underground” begins just over the border in China. Because of China’s official political support of North Korea, the Chinese government refuses to recognize escapees as refugees (even though China has signed the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees). Nor does China allow the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to operate in the country.

North Koreans in China live constantly under threat of arrest and repatriation. Women are often trafficked, sold as “brides” in response to a shortage of partners in China (due to that country’s history of male preference that has created a “sex imbalance … [of] epic proportions).” The children of these North Korean/Chinese unions perhaps suffer the most, trapped in stateless limbo: The fear of exposing a North Korean mother’s illegal status prevents a Chinese father from officially registering the child who, in effect, doesn’t exist and therefore has no access to education and healthcare.

Within and beyond China, remarkable heroes extend the escape networks into numerous Asian countries as they work to send North Korean escapees to freedom in South Korea and beyond. These heroes include: Steve Kim, founder of 318 Partners (named for Article 318 of the Chinese criminal code which sent him to jail for aiding North Koreans in China); “Mary and Jim,” a retired couple, who run orphanages in China for mixed children abandoned by missing North Korean mothers and desperate Chinese fathers (the undocumented status of these children makes them ineligible for adoption); and “Mr. Jung,” who has undergone face-changing surgeries to repeatedly fool Chinese authorities while rescuing South Korean prisoners of war held illegally in North Korea since 1953.

The tenacity of such brave individuals is sharply contrasted with the failure of the world – especially South Korea, the United States, even the United Nations – to confront and combat North Korea’s atrocities. Kirkpatrick convincingly argues that escaped North Koreans – from starving children to highly-placed officials – will prove to be the best weapon against toppling the despotic, third-generation Kim regime.

Kirkpatrick is a methodical writer, and Escape from North Korea is a solid, matter-of-fact title that falls somewhere in between the unrelenting brutality of Blaine Harden’s recent Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, and the flowing narrative of Barbara Demick’s lauded 2010 National Book Award nonfiction finalist, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. As literature, Escape from North Korea is efficient at best; it reads like a series of separate articles patched together. Certain details are unnecessarily repetitive (such as explaining yet again who North Korean founder Kim Il Sung is, two-thirds through the book). Other details seem oddly missing and sometimes surprisingly inaccurate. Kirkpatrick refers to the underground railroad-multiplying organization LiNK (Liberty in North Korea) as “founded at Yale University in 2004 by two Korean-American students,” but identifies only one founder (whose story is one of the book’s most inspiring). Meanwhile, however, Kirkpatrick neglects to tell readers about the never-named co-founder who was actually already a California college graduate when LiNK began.

Quibbles, inaccuracies, and typos aside, Kirkpatrick undoubtedly offers an eye-opening opportunity to explore an overlooked, pressing topic. She shares with readers the harrowing testimonies, the wrenching struggles, and the inspiring successes. Regretfully, in its current incarnation, Escape reads like a powerful draft waiting for a diligent editor’s transformative prowess.

Review: Christian Science Monitor, November 26, 2012

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Nonfiction, Korean, Korean American, Nonethnic-specific, North Korean

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November 24, 2012 · 9:06 am

Children of War: Voices of Iraqi Refugees by Deborah Ellis

Bestselling Canadian anti-war activist Deborah Ellis‘s four nonfiction titles (thus far) for younger readers should be bundled together and sent to every policymaker throughout the world. Two of those four, Kids of Kabul: Living Bravely through a Never-Ending War and Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak, give voice to children living in active war zones. Off to War: Voices of Soldiers’ Children features the children left behind in the United States and Canada by deployed military. Children of War looks at lives attempting to be reclaimed by surviving families who have fled a war-torn homeland for an often unwelcoming new country.

Hibba, 16: “I have nothing in common with American children. How could I? They are raised up with peace and fun and security. … We are raised with war and fear. It’s a big difference.”

Michael, 12: “I think it would make the world better if people had to fix the things they broke. Like, if someone bombs your house, they couldn’t go away and do things they wanted to do until they built you a new house and fixed what they broke.”

Sara, 15: “We all miss our homeland. We had friends there, and lives that could have been wonderful.”

Eva, 17: “Hating people is not part of our culture, but the war is sending people back to the dark ages It is destroying who we are. Iraqis love sports and literature, and poetry and science, and gardens, all good things. Iraqis don’t like all this killing.”

Iraq is a young country, gaining independence in 1932, although the civilization that originated there is one of the world’s oldest, its ancient glory buried in the hanging gardens of Babylon, its written literary history dating back over 2000 years with the Epic of Gilgamesh. Tragically, Iraq’s recent history is defined by violence and war, from the eight-year Iran-Iraq War that began in 1980, to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 which sparked the First Gulf War, to the post-9/11 U.S. invasion in 2003.

While Ellis provides important political and historical context here, Ellis’ focus is clearly on the  youngest victims: “The children in this book are mostly refugees who fled Iraq because of the war and were living in Jordan in the fall of 2007.” She chose Jordan “simply because the entry process was easier than for Syria.” Five million Iraqis were displaced by war, 3 million were unable to leave Iraq and live in remote tent camps; many of the survivors able to get out went to Jordan and Syria.

Nearly a decade has passed since Saddam Hussein was deposed. And yet the troubled nation remains in the headlines for the seemingly unending sectarian violence. The majority of those surviving children are no more, having grown into troubled adulthood. What now? What now?

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2009

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September 26, 2012 · 9:33 am

Soul Calling: A Photographic Journey through the Hmong Diaspora by Joel Pickford, foreword by Kao Kalia Yang

Joel Pickford‘s titular journey took him through an 8,000-mile trek to some of the most remote villages in Laos, five years of interviewing Hmong refugees, and five years of reading Hmong history and ethnography. The result is a gorgeous, startling, intimate portrait of an ethnic community on opposite sides of the world, connected by centuries of culture and history, scattered by decades of conflict and war.

“The story Joel Pickford tells,” notes Hmong American author Kao Kalia Yang (The Latecomers: A Hmong Family Memoir) in her foreword, ” … is a story of how a people starved by war search for food in a nation whose history has never included them.” That ‘nation’ is multiple nations: centuries ago, China pushed out the Hmong south to Laos; during the Vietnam War, the U.S. military recruited and trained Hmong in Laos to fight the North Vietnamese Army, then virtually erased them as part of a so-called “Secret War” which the U.S. government denied for decades; post-war communist Laos persecuted and further displaced the Hmong; Thailand mistreated then expelled Hmong refugees. Today, the U.S. is home to the largest diasporic Hmong population in the West, yet their migration here has been challenging at best, sometimes tragic at worst.

“This is a document of human experience across blue oceans and the expanse of generations,” Yang continues. “The time for neglect and forgetting is through; may the Hmong spirit find its way on the long journey home to the places where our bodies are seen and our souls’ cries are heard.”

Pickford’s camera sees with acuity, records with empathy. His testimony begins with “The New Arrivals, 2004-2006″ in Fresno, California, which already has an established Hmong American community that began with the first refugee influx in the mid-1970s  following the 1975 Communist takeover of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Pickford captures their uncertainty and their hope, their survivor scars and their future dreams, their traditional ceremonies and adaptive improvisations. Ironically, tragically, as his photographic journey moves from recent refugees to established Hmong Americans, Pickford comes to realize that the Hmong who have been in the U.S. longer actually “practice a purer form of Hmong culture” because the majority of the newer arrivals have survived the last two decades trapped in Thai camps, denied access to what was once their familiar, familial village lives.

From Hmong America, Pickford travels to Laos, visiting various mountain villages, often accessible only on foot. At 6’4″ and carrying some 45 pounds of photographic equipment, Pickford certainly stands out. In one especially remote area, he is the first falang (foreigner) whom the villagers have ever seen. Time seems to have stopped in many of these rural destinations, untouched by electricity, machinery, even roads. As he considers his Hmong American friends back in California, Pickford contemplates the vast differences between ‘here’ and ‘there.’ He “seriously consider[s] spending the next year of [his] life in [one] remote village,” in order to “really figure out what life in this village is all about.” No longer sure how much he “really understand[s],” he offers these complex, story-filled images as guides …

In addition to this magnificent book, Pickford’s photographs will be featured in a major exhibition: “Soul Calling” opens at the Fresno Art Museum this Friday, September 28, and runs through January 6, 2013. If you’re anywhere near, don’t miss it. “I have a vision of photography as an imperfect two-way mirror, through which people from different cultures attempt to look at one another but, to a large extent, see only themselves,” Pickford writes. Indeed, this is not someone else’s story, this is all our stories.

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2012

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September 9, 2012 · 4:50 pm

Zoya’s Story: An Afghan Woman’s Struggle for Freedom by Zoya with John Follain and Rita Cristofari

Zoya was just a year old when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. By age 4, she made a Russian woman soldier cry when she refused to accept her proffered chocolate. She was raised mostly by her devout grandmother, while both parents worked to free their homeland. When Zoya was 8, her mother finally revealed her work: “to help women and to bring peace to her country” through RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the local warlords moved in, bringing more violence than ever before: “… my people were exhausted after suffering war for so many years. They had thrown out the Russians, but they no longer had the strength to rise up against the fundamentalists.”

In 1992, both Zoya’s parents disappeared in quick succession. With RAWA’s help, Zoya’s grandmother took Zoya and fled Kabul for Pakistan, to finally give Zoya a “proper education.” Just two years later, at 16, Zoya committed her life to RAWA. Putting her own safety and comfort aside, she joins a growing legion of committed, brave women – and a few men – to empower Afghan women and girls, to voice their struggles, and to work ceaselessly to reclaim their country from the suffocating Taliban. By just 23, Zoya is an international presence, fighting for the basic human rights for every Afghan woman and child.

Zoya is not her real name. Ironically, while she adamantly refused the chocolate from the Russian soldier, years later, she unhesitatingly accepted a Russian writer’s parting request that she take her dead daughter’s name: ”I did not even think of the Russians who had invaded Afghanistan – I knew there was a huge difference between a country’s government and its people.” Her chilling, unembellished memoir, as told to two award-winning journalists, is a mixture of utter horror (how do human beings even imagine such heinous tortures, much less actually commit them??!!) and unflagging courage. The book’s back cover of the original hardcover simply lists just some of the “restrictions and mistreatment of women under the Taliban,” including bans against medical treatment of women by male doctors, bans against laughing loudly, wearing brightly colored clothes, washing clothes next to rivers or public places, and wearing flared wide-leg pants even under a burqa. That burqa-wearing woman, Zoya observes, “is more like a live body locked in a coffin.”

Again and again, the clearest message is the need for education, especially of women and girls: “the children of Afghanistan were allowed to carry a Kalashnikov but not their homework,” she wryly observes. Education saved Zoya, and she works tirelessly to educate other girls and women, knowing that only true knowledge will bring lasting power.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2002

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Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, Afghan, Nonethnic-specific

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September 7, 2012 · 2:36 pm

Kids of Kabul: Living Bravely through a Never-Ending War by Deborah Ellis

Mega-award-winning author Deborah Ellis‘s active interest in Afghanistan began in 1996 when she heard about the Taliban takeover of that country “and the crimes they perpetrated against women and girls.” She became involved with the Afghan communities in her native Canada, then traveled to meet Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Russia, and most recently returned to Kabul just last year. In a land ravaged by decades of neverending war, “[t]he real losers are the Afghan people, especially the women and children.”

By giving voice to the Afghan community in numerous books – Women of the Afghan War for adults, and the ever-popular middle grade/young adult Breadwinner Trilogy (The Breadwinner, Parvana’s Journey, and Mud City) – Ellis has single-handedly raised over a million dollars in book royalties for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan and Street Kid International. Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan benefits again with all royalties from Kids in Kabul, Ellis’ latest title. [Take note: be patient a little longer ... that memorable Breadwinner trilogy is about to grow, with a brand new sequel, My Name Is Parvana, hitting U.S. shelves next month!]

Post-9/11, Afghanistan remains a war zone; even after the Taliban government was officially ousted, the Afghan people have not had peace for the past 11 years. “The billions and billions spent on the war, which might have been spent on education, health care, housing and rebuilding a civil society, have been spent on weapons,” Ellis soberly writes in her “Introduction.” Although more than half of Afghan children don’t have access to education, they’re making every effort to better their lives, as best as they can amidst violence, corruption, repression, and worse. Ellis traveled for a week in Kabul (because of security reasons, she couldn’t move beyond the dangerous capital) in early 2011 to talk to children.

The 27  girls and boys included here range from ages 11 to 17, most with photographs revealing their thoughtful young faces (which, I admit, makes me worry about their safety now that they are so easily identifiable). Each of their stories is introduced with relevant, contextual, cultural details from Ellis’ sharp observations. Most of the children are fatherless, many are orphans. Some are going to school, some will never have the chance. All have survived horrors no child should, including watching loved ones murdered, the brutality of child marriage, loss of home, safety, basic rights, even limbs.

“I want to be a doctor, of course. This the dream of many Afghans because we have seen so much death and suffering,” says 16-year-old Aman.

“At school I have learned that there are better ways to do things than all this war, war, war all the time. It’s the younger generation that will change that. My generation. Me,” says Mustala, 13.

“Sometimes we play on the big field at the stadium, the same stadium the Taliban used for all the terrible things they did – the shootings, cutting of people’s hands, the executions and torture. When we play there … it is like getting some justice for all those women who were hurt. We play for them as much as ourselves,” says 16-year-old Palwasha.

“I am happiest when I am in this library. All of our problems can be solved with these books,” says Sigrullah, 14.

Against challenging, sometime inhumane conditions, these children manage to thrive: “It is good to be hopeful,” Ellis reminds, “and if the future could be in the hands of this generation of young people, with their eagerness, openness and determination, then Afghanistan could indeed be a garden again.”

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2012

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August 15, 2012 · 10:22 am

Ru by Kim Thúy, translated by Sheila Fischman

* STARRED REVIEW
The recipient of international accolades – including Canada’s coveted Governor General’s Award (2010) for its original Canadian debut in French – this extraordinary first novel unfolds like ethereal poetry. The enigmatic title means “a small stream and, figuratively, a flow, a discharge—of tears, blood, of money” in French; in Vietnamese, it’s a “lullaby, to lull.” Made up of spare vignettes that flow through decades, this autobiographical narrative reveals a girl’s journey from wealthy privilege in Vietnam; her reinvention as a war refugee in Canada; her return to her birth country, where she is considered “too fat to be Vietnamese” – not because of her stature, but because “the American dream had made me more substantial, heavier, weightier”; and her own overwhelming motherhood.

Verdict: Interwoven with glimpses of cousin Sao Mai who was Uncle Two’s princess, of a father “who always inspired the greatest, most wonderful happiness,” of Aunt Seven’s mystery son raised by Aunt Four, and of young cousins and what they innocently did on the streets to survive, this is much more than another immigration story. For readers in search of intricate, mesmerizing narrative, Ru will not disappoint.

Review: “Fiction,” Library Journal, August 15, 2012

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012 (United States)

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Filed under ...Absolute Favorites, ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Memoir, .Translation, Canadian Asian Pacific American, Vietnamese, Vietnamese American

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April 9, 2012 · 3:33 pm

Sông I Sing: Poems by Bao Phi

April is National Poetry Month. Every once in a long while, even a poetry-dullard like me has a poetic WOW!-moment. Certainly I’m not alone … Bao Phi is a nationally-lauded performance poet, twice winning the Minnesota Grand Poetry Slam and twice winning poetry slams at Nuyorican Poets Cafe in NYC. He’s appeared on HBO Presents Russell Simmons Def Poetry (season 3, episode 6), and was a National Poetry Slam finalist in 2000. His poem, “Race,” was selected in The Best American Poetry 2006.

Given his credentials, that Sông I Sing is Phi’s first collection is somewhat surprising, as welcome as it is. [He did previously debut three chapbooks Last Name First (2005), The Way We Pay (2004), and Surviving the Translation: Collected Poems from 1993-2002 (2002).] Dedicated “for my Asian American people,” Phi’s work is racial, historical, political, sociological … most of all, even when he’s subdued and thoughtful, Phi is angry – powerfully, elegantly, justifiably angry.

Of the four sections, each prefaced by the words of a fellow ethnic writer (Lac Su, Julie Otsuka, Pablo Neruda, Joy Harjo, David Mura), the second and longest proves most resonating for its simplicity and complexity both. Titled “The Nguyễns,” Phi opens with a quote from Julie Otsuka’s astonishing When the Emperor Was Divine: “Who am I? You know who I am. Or you think you do … I’m the one you call Gook. I’m the one you don’t see at all – we all look alike …”

In the section’s 14 poems, all share the common Vietnamese name Nguyễn, they might have had a few similar experiences, but none of them ‘look alike’: Vu Nguyễn from Sacramento wants his revenge against Chavis Johnson “for pushing me down in ninth grade / and calling me gook”; Kaylee Nguyễn from Chicago who, as a chef, wants to tell you “that when I see the wilted attempts at vegan Vietnamese cuisine / made by white people in co-ops / I think of Britney Spears in an áo dài”; John Nguyễn who is serving out his ROTC in Iraq who insists, “let no one say I fought this war to make a better world / for our unborn children”; Katrina Nguyễn from New Orleans who “never heard my own name more often … [b]ut no one sees me”; Dotty Nguyễn from Dallas who pleads “Ask me anything, just don’t ask me / To stop calling you my mother”; and Vinh and Linda Nguyễn sharing a fire escape reminisce about going “to that f**ked-up poetry show / even when I told you I felt like watching spoken word / was like paying five bucks to get punched repeatedly in the face / and say thank you – .” Despite the anger, Phi surely knows how to laugh, too …

This week in DC is not unlike a Bao Phi-celebration. With the annual AAAS (Association of Asian American Studies) Conference in capital residence, you’ll have multiple public opportunities to see, hear, experience Phi in livetime:

All you need to do is choose one … or more.

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2011

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April 2, 2012 · 4:50 pm

Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West by Blaine Harden

Escape from Camp 14 is the most devastating book I have ever read. Perhaps the resilience of youth got me through the aftermath of learning about slavery, the Holocaust, even Iris Chang’s now-classic The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust, the title I previously held as the most horrific testimony of inhumanity.

More recently, I cried through 2010 National Book Award nonfiction finalist Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. I ignorantly questioned the veracity of the torturous conditions in Adam Johnson’s recent, deservedly bestselling novel The Orphan Master’s Son. I paid attention to headlines about North Korea’s potential nuclear threats and the succession of Kim Jong Eun to the mythic Kim Dynasty.

But nothing prepared me for the odyssey of North Korean Shin Dong-Hyuk as told by journalist Blaine Harden, former Washington Post bureau chief for East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Shin, who changed his name “after arriving in South Korea, an attempt to reinvent himself as a free man,” is the only known North Korean who was born in a prison camp to have escaped and survived.

Shin’s story is vastly different from that of other survivors; as Harden chillingly reveals, it doesn’t fit “a conventional narrative arc [of survival]” which includes a loving family, a comfortable home, a sense of community governed by moral principles, from which the protagonist is brutally torn. In utter contrast, Shin began his life barely human: his prisoner parents were arbitrarily paired by guards to breed, whatever offspring they produced would become slaves who would work and die in Camp 14, considered “[b]y reputation … the toughest” of the country’s six known camps.

Shin experienced no familial bonds. His mother was nothing more than competition for food. He barely saw his older brother and father. He described himself “as a predator who had been bred in the camp to inform on family and friends – and feel no remorse.” Preying equaled survival. Only much later would Shin learn the criminal history of his family: “The unforgivable crime Shin’s father had committed was being the brother of two young men who had fled south during [the Korean War]… Shin’s unforgivable crime was being his father’s son.”

At 4, he witnessed his first execution. At 6, he watched a classmate beaten to death for having five grains of corn in her pocket. At 14, he survived heinous torture, then witnessed his mother being hung and his brother shot. At 22, he lost a finger as punishment for dropping a sewing machine.

At 23, on January 2, 2005, Shin climbed over the electrified corpse of his fellow escapee, and began a labyrinthine journey toward freedom. His own slight body bears innumerable scars of mutilation. When he escaped, he knew virtually nothing of the outside world, yet he miraculously traversed North Korea, China, South Korea, and finally made his way to the United States.

To call Shin’s adjustment to his new life “difficult” is grave understatement: “’I escaped physically … I haven’t escaped psychologically.’” Defectors understandably suffer from a myriad of clinical symptoms including post-traumatic syndrome, paranoia, paralyzing survival guilt. Shin struggles at an even more basic level: “’I am evolving from being an animal … [b]ut it is going very, very slowly.’”

As horrific as Shin’s ordeals have been, “’Shin had a relatively comfortable life by the standards of other children in the camps,’” a former camp guard and driver told Harden. Others have endured “worse hardship.” Compounding such stomach-churning news is the realization that “[t]he camps have barely pricked the world’s collective conscience.” They hold 200,000 prisoners according to the U.S. State Department and several human rights groups; they have lasted twice as long as the Soviet Gulag, and 12 times longer than the Nazi concentration camps. Google Earth provides high-resolution satellite photographs “to anyone with an Internet connection.” Amnesty International has documented new construction in the camps as recently as 2011.

A book without parallel, Escape from Camp 14 is a riveting nightmare that bears witness to the worst inhumanity, an unbearable tragedy magnified by the fact that the horror continues at this very moment without an end in sight. Inspired by Harden’s front-page Washington Post story in December 2008 – the article from which this book originated – a reader addresses a chilling question to all of us: “’High school students in America debate why President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t bomb all the rail lines to Hitler’s camps … Their children may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il’s camps, and did nothing.’”

Review: Christian Science Monitor, April 2, 2012

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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July 14, 2011 · 9:05 am

World and Town by Gish Jen

Hattie Kong’s email inbox is full of desperate pleas from various relatives to please send back her parents’ bones to the family plot in Qufu, China. Because her American missionary mother and her Confucius-descended Chinese father found their final rest in Iowa, the remaining Kong family members are convinced that all manner of unfortunate events – from anorexia to useless boyfriends to even a four-wheel-drive vehicle getting stuck – are a direct result of her parents’ afterlife estrangement from their Kong ancestors, never mind that Hattie’s late mother is actually reposed in her hometown. “‘Hogwash,’” continues to be Hattie’s reply.

At 68, Hattie is mostly alone. Born and raised in China, she landed in the U.S. as a teenager and stayed. She recently lost her husband and best friend, one after the other; her one son lives in Hong Kong, while she lives with her dogs in upstate New York. She’s retired from her biology teaching job, she has a few friends whom she meets to walk and eat. She paints although not necessarily well.

When a Cambodian family arrives with a trailer – thanks to a local church group – just beyond her backyard, Hattie takes cookies and delivers their kitchen drawer (which only Hattie seemed to notice when it fell out during the move). Hattie’s rescue mission is just beginning. The traumatized parents and the older son are survivors of Cambodia’s Killing Fields; their American-born daughter Sophy has a troubled past all her own.

As Hattie adjusts her daily routines to accommodate her new neighbors, Hattie’s heart relives old challenges when her first love, Carter, appears in town. Suddenly her controlled, well-regulated life is anything but … and she must fight old friends, electronic intrusions, God Squad, and even her own ‘Hattie-is-batty’-doubts to somehow regain her crumbling balance.

In spite of moments of clever buoyancy, Gish Jen‘s fourth novel (six years after The Love Wife) seems much … well … heavier than her others. Hattie’s self-absorption, too often mixed with self-pity, becomes weighty baggage over the almost-400 pages. As I was plodding through the final chapters, my mother proudly, even gleefully announced (on the Fourth of July, of all days), that she had finally finished Jen’s debut, Typical American, with delighted enjoyment. Shockingly, that book is already two decades old … and I must admit, I found myself longing for those whimsical, exasperated, hysterical days of Jen’s ‘typical’ youth …

Readers: Adult

Published: 2010

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July 11, 2011 · 2:36 pm

A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park

Since 2002 Newbery winner Linda Sue Park‘s latest title was published in November 2010, borders shifted (again) and the world recognized the birth of the newest nation, the Republic of South Sudan, on July 9 at midnight. The weekend announcement makes A Long Walk to Water almost an anachronism – the included map is no longer accurate, country names will need updating – and yet the importance of this searing double narrative deserves even more attention than ever before. Park’s slim new book is remarkable.

Nya’s story, told in copper print, begins in 2008 with the eponymous “long walk to water” which the 11-year-old faces daily – a sweltering journey that takes all morning, which she must repeat all afternoon each and every day of her life. Her family’s survival depends on access to that valuable water, and they must migrate with the water’s availability, chasing after what is sometimes merely mud in order to endure through to the next season.

Also making a hot, dusty journey is an 11-year-old boy named Salva Dut, his tale captured in crisp black type. In 1985, he flees his school away from the latest marauding rebel soldiers. Separated from his family, Salva’s escape to safety proves grueling and will take him through Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, and eventually to upstate New York. His odyssey will last over a decade; Salva is one of the “Lost Boys of Sudan” who survived. His story here is true.

Nya is Nuer. Salva is Dinka. Their respective tribes have been fighting each other for hundreds of years, and yet their physical resemblance is so strong that only the scar patterns on people’s faces can distinguish their tribal affiliations. In spite of their inherited warring past, Nya and Salva’s lives will intersect in a life-saving effort of cooperation and peace.

The two Sudanese Civil Wars between north and south began in 1955 and has decimated the country for over half a century. With new, solid hope for lasting peace with the birth of South Sudan, Salva’s extraordinary story provides both necessary testimony of the innocent suffering that must finally end, and an urgent reminder of the vast rebuilding challenges the new nation faces.

In 2003, Salva began Water for Sudan – its mission is simple, to build wells and bring safe water to remote villages in southern Sudan. According to the organization’s website, as of May 2011, 104 wells are bringing safe water to tens of thousands of South Sudanese villagers. Lost no more, Salva’s “dreams of helping the people back home in Sudan are beginning to come true.”

Readers: Middle Grade

Published: 2010

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Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Nonfiction, African, Korean American

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