Tag Archives: War
Last Airlift: A Vietnamese Orphan’s Rescue from War by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch is one of those mega-award-winning Canadian authors (with more than a dozen titles) who hasn’t crossed over our shared border (just yet!) with the same success. She’s best known for her historical novels for younger readers about what must be one of the most difficult subjects ever – children and war. Her latest, which debuted far north last fall, hits U.S. shelves next week (March already!). Airlift is Skrypuch’s first narrative nonfiction, the true story of Son Thi Anh Tuyet and her last days in her native Vietnam and her first days with her Canadian family.
Tuyet can’t remember life before she came to live in the Saigon orphanage with all the children, babies, and nuns. Her only memory of “outside” are occasional visits of a woman with a young boy, who may or may not have been her mother and brother. “‘After a while, they stopped coming.’”
On April 11, 1975, Tuyet is frantically packed into the back of a van with babies and toddlers strapped into makeshift boxes headed to the airport. She is one of 57 children on what will turn out to be the last Canadian airlift operation to save orphans from a war-torn Saigon on the verge of collapse. As an older child of 8 with a leg weakened by polio, Tuyet is convinced she’s been brought only to help care for the younger children; as long as she remains useful, perhaps she will not be sent back to the orphanage.
Her remarkable journey – filled with unfamiliar faces, words she cannot understand, a future that seems so uncertain – lands her with a family of her own. “‘You are my daughter,’” her new mother assures her even before she can understand the words, “‘Not my helper.’” “Grass … swing … play,” her new father teaches her. And “‘sister,’” her new siblings call her with comforting hugs and kisses.
Enhanced with documents and a surprising number of photographs, Airlift is a touching, multi-layered experience. The strength of Skrypuch’s storytelling shows strongest in the smallest details: Tuyet’s wonder at discovering that stars are real things in the sky, her knowing better than the adults that to quiet the screaming babies is to place them close together, her doubt about “dads … [who] didn’t seem very real [as] she had never actually seen one.”
In the ending “Author’s Note,” Skrypuch explains how her initially intended novel became Tuyet’s narrative: ” … I was going to piece together a story of one orphan based on the experiences of many. But as I recreated these experiences from my research, an interesting thing happened. In small flashes, Tuyet bagan to remember more. … When Last Airlift was complete, Tuyet was overwhelmed by the fact that it was, in fact, her own story that had been reclaimed.”
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult
Published: 2012 (United States) Continue reading
Waiting: A Novel of Uganda at War by Goretti Kyomuhendo, afterword by M.J. Daymond
Still a young teenager, Alinda knows only too well the potential horrors of war … and yet her immediate family has, thus far, managed to miraculously remain intact and relatively safe. In 1979, the reign of Idi Amin – the internationally infamous Ugandan despot responsible for the extermination of some half a million people – is nearly ended, and yet citizens are not safe from the continuing violence brought by terrorizing soldiers and wandering “Liberators.”
Even in their remote village, the gunshots are never far enough; every night, Alinda’s extended family and neighbors gather to sleep away from their homes, on the edge of the banana plantation. Everything of value has been buried in pits, hopefully a safe distance from their houses. In spite of the looming danger, Kaaka, the grandmotherly family servant, claims herself too old to bother to seek nightly safety. Then Alinda’s mother, heavily pregnant and about to give birth, refuses to go to the sleeping place, as well.
Day after day, night after night, the villagers wait. Bullets, then a landmine, too soon shatter the village peace. When the “Liberators” – relatively peaceful, yet very hungry – arrive in droves, Alinda’s brother becomes fascinated with the peripatetic heroes, while her best friend and younger sister can’t seem to stay away from their makeshift tents. Meanwhile the adults worry about their depleted granaries … and the growing uncertainty of all their futures.
Goretti Kyomuhendo is a multi-award winning novelist in her native Uganda. Waiting, her first title to be published in the U.S. (from the lauded academic indie publisher Feminist Press), is not so much a story well-told as it is a sensitive meditation particularly focused on the effects of conflict and war on women. As the oldest daughter, Alinda must think first about her caregiver duties over her desire to return to school. The single mother Nyinabarongo and her young daughter are throwaway cast-offs from her husband and his family. The never-named “Lendu woman,” whose husband often travels, is shunned as a foreigner and labelled a witch for her healing herbs. The many wives of Alinda’s Uncle Kembo – depending on his interchangeable religious affiliation – seem to be little more than equally interchangeable bedmates for convenience and comfort.
Kyomuhendo is unblinking in her characterizations of Ugandan women in crisis … and yet what is steadfastly imprinted by book’s end is the women’s determination to survive and even flourish in circumstances dire, tragic, and often unimaginable.
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2007 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Fiction, African
Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung
As Janie weeps over her first-ever separation from her mother, who is about to give birth, her grandmother admonishes her with the grave responsibility Janie must bear for her new sibling. “In our family … a sister always dies,” her grandmother warns, sharing the horrific tale of her own infant sister’s death during the Japanese occupation of Korea.
Two decades later, living Stateside, Janie’s family is in crisis: sister Hannah has severed family ties, while their father faces terminal cancer. Seeking the latest treatments, her parents return to Korea, charging Janie with bringing Hannah back. The sisters’ devastating confrontation sends Janie alone to rejoin her parents and extended family, each scarred by the terrifying legacy of colonial occupation, war, dangerous politics, and a fractured country.
Verdict: No argument that the prize-winning Chung writes elegiac, exquisite, multilayered prose, yet her debut ultimately falters between too much (self-absorption overload, cousin Gabe’s death, sleazy adviser) and not enough (Hannah’s disappearance, her uncle’s silence). For greater satisfaction, readers might try Sonya Chung‘s Long for This World or Chang-rae Lee‘s The Surrendered.
Review: “Fiction,” Library Journal, February 1, 2012
Readers: Adult
Published: 2012 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, Korean American
Words from a Granary: An Anthology of Short Stories by Ugandan Women Writers edited by Violet Barungi
Considered together, this collection of 15 stories is a welcome statement of women’s literary empowerment. The second anthology published by FEMRITE, the Uganda Women Writers’ Association founded by novelist/short story writer/playwright-turned Ugandan Cabinet member Mary Karoro Okurut and officially launched in 1996, is testimony that “Ugandan women writers refuse to be discouraged by the appalling lack of a reading culture in the country,” insists editor Violet Barungi in the introduction. “They keep wielding their pens, churning out more and more reading material in the hope that one day, our people will realise that reading is the backbone of intellectual empowerment and an integral part of development.”
With respect and admiration for such commendable intentions, Words – examined as individual stories – is an uneven mix ranging from disappointing amateur efforts to memorable glimpses into even stronger writing to come. The majority of the 15 here understandably reflect Uganda’s turbulent history since its independence in 1962; the gruesome, all-too-common violence against women is undeniably prevalent in these pages, as is the constant struggle for survival amidst unfair, unjust conditions.
“Chained” by Monica Arac de Nyeko is perhaps the most terrifying of all, about a student forced to betray her entire convent school and witness their heinous massacre by a rebel gang, then herself commit an unthinkable act in order to buy her freedom. Just as disturbing and tragic is a silenced, almost casual violence against women, as documented in a wedding-day rape in “Esteri’s Secret” by Winnie Gashumba Munyarugerero, incestuous rape in “Out of the Trap” by Ayeta Anne Wangusa, workplace rape in “Hard Truth” by Lillian Tindyebwa, and random multiple rapes during a bus raid in “End of a Journey” by Waltraud Ndagijimana.
Among the anthology’s 15, two stories prove most resonating. The collection’s first, “I Watch You My Sister” by Goretti Kyomuhendo examines a homeless woman from afar as she fights to be noticed in order to stay alive; the repetition of the phrase “I watch you, my sister …” is a strangely lulling refrain against the tragedy playing out from paragraph to paragraph. Closer to the end, “Stepdaughter” by Deborah Etoori is the only happy tale, capturing the developing relationship between two students and their eventual decision to become a true family.
“The anthology is the outcome of a three-year programme of training workshops geared towards equipping creative women writers with writing skills,” explains editor Barungi. In the decade since the collection’s original publication, a number of the authors included here have continued to hone those skills … as I continue my own multi-culti literary education, I’m planning to explore some of those efforts here on BookDragon. Do join me!
Readers: Adult
Published: 2001 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Short Stories, African
A Thousand Sisters: My Journey into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman by Lisa J. Shannon, foreword by Zainab Salbi
Can anyone really understand such a number: 5,400,000. The death of a single loved one can leave you staggering and lost … how can anyone even fathom 5.4 million human beings who have been murdered in a single country … since 1998!
Lisa Shannon, a Portland art director, lived a contented life in her cozy Victorian home with her charming partner in both business and life. Yet when her father dies, she’s paralyzed and can’t even drag herself off the couch, relying on Oprah for company. Then on January 24, 2005, a 20-minute segment highlighting the ongoing violence against women in the Congo catapults Shannon to the other side of the world.
“I have to do it now, before it becomes one more thing I meant to do.” So Shannon joins 6,000 Oprah viewers and sponsors two Congolese women. Then she starts running: 30.16 miles to raise 31 more sponsorships through Women for Women International (whose legendary founder, Zainab Salbi, writes the Foreword here). Her first time out, she raises $28,000, enough to change the lives of 80 Congolese women and their children.
She takes her runs on the road, organized as the Run for Congo Women (runs are happening regularly). And in 2007 she arrives in the Congo … where she will meet the most unforgettable women, each survivors of unimaginable atrocities and tragedies. These are her thousand sisters (and more) by whom she will be changed forever though laughter, tears, desperation, anger, gratitude, and finally furaha – joy. Amidst the horror, furaha sana – ”so much joy.”
I read A Thousand Sisters without pause on a long flight that took me away from where most of the book happens – Africa. I had started Sisters numerous times while traveling next door to the Congo, but the font size in the paperback version was so tiny as to make my aging eyeballs roll into the back of my head in defeat. Inflight, I found myself extremely thankful for the sharp, focused beam of the personal overhead light … yet another head-thunking reminder of the choices I have, the privileges I’ve been granted, mostly because the random circumstance of my birth far away from ‘the worst place on earth to be a woman.’
Now that I know, now that you know … what will we do? Shannon is certainly prepared … two of the final pages, entitled “Find Your Own Furaha,” gives you seven immediate actions “you can do for the Congo right now.” All you have to do to get started is open to page 1 …
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, African, Nonethnic-specific
The End of the World by Sushma Joshi
Few Nepali writers have thus far landed on western bookshelves, with only two exceptions who come immediately to mind – elegant Samrat Upadhyay (Arresting God in Kathmandu, The Royal Ghosts) and activist Manjushree Thapa (The Tutor of History, Seasons of Flight). So to find another Nepali author writing in English is a gratifying discovery indeed.
Born and based in Kathmandu, Sushma Joshi is another hybrid global writer (and filmmaker), with her Indian and American education, as well as numerous fellowships and residencies all over the world. First published in Nepal in 2008, Joshi’s debut short story collection (which includes an acknowledging – small world – nod to Thapa), was one of 57 titles long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2009. Reprinted late last year, World is immediately available via Kindle (for just $2.99 currently). [NO, I am absolutely not a sudden Kindle-convert, but impatience will make me do strange things!]
What proves most memorable about the collection’s eight stories is an open earnestness in Joshi’s storytelling. Her writing is guileless and energetic, at times refreshing although occasionally a bit clumsy. If her writing seems to lack a polished, sustained subtlety, her directness gives her stories a welcome sense of truthful urgency.
Notables include “Cheese,” in which a servant boy must wait decades to finally taste the precious foreign treat called “chij,” “Law and Order” in which a wannabe officer settles for the local police force but can’t live according to the law, “The End of the World” about the ironic sense of freedom people briefly experience thinking that tomorrow will never come, and “The Blockade” about a man who has spent a year away in foreign menial labor in order to support his family and returns home to disaster.
In each of Joshi’s stories, everyday people are merely trying to survive challenges far beyond their own making, whether strict social stratification, unending war, widespread corruption, political upheavals, or all-consuming natural disasters. Nepal’s last tumultuous decades have left the citizens with little room for anything more than the struggle to just get through the day. Most tragic of all is a sense of resigned acceptance that leaves little hope for a future desperately in need of change.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Short Stories, Nepali
Beneath the Lion’s Gaze by Maaza Mengiste + Author Interview
Maaza Mengiste‘s voice, delivered by telephone many thousands of miles away, sounds impossibly young and happy. She’s easy to talk to, easy to laugh with. She’s in Rome for another few months, enjoying the spring sun, sipping another cup of tea in a nearby café, and watching the many American tourists wandering by.
Her idyllic life for the moment seems at odds with her own early past — filled with uncertainty, inexplicable violence, and constant fear. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Maaza was just 3 years old when the 1974 Ethiopian revolution broke out, ousting a 3,000-year-old monarchy and replacing it with the brutal Derg regime that destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives before its collapse in 1991. Maaza was too young to understand what was happening, but perceptive enough to retain shattering images of that horrific time that have stayed with her through the years. Decades later, Maaza pieced together those memories to write her award-winning, critically acclaimed debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, published in early 2010.
At the core of Maaza’s searing work are one family’s hellish experiences during the 1974 revolution. The family’s patriarch — the good doctor Hailu — is a prominent, proud man highly trained to alleviate pain, cure illness, and save the dying. And yet he can do nothing for his beloved wife who lies in a hospital bed, shriveled, exhausted, and ready to pass on. Hailu’s elder son Yonas gravely tries to hold his family together, but is himself helpless when his young daughter becomes seriously ill and his wife Sara is crushed by the fear of potential loss.
Unlike the controlled, watchful Yonas, Hailu’s younger son Dawit is still idealistic, still fueled by a rash temper that once put a fellow student in the hospital when Dawit, too young to understand rape, witnessed that student committing a vicious crime against a family servant. Dawit is devoted to his dying mother, emotionally dependent on his sister-in-law Sara, and in love with a headstrong young woman. He looks on in anguish and disgust as the new regime claims his childhood best friend, who uses complicity as a way to escape his deprived past spent in a mud shack adjacent to the luxury of Hailu’s two-story home.
The revolution shatters the family’s lives: Hailu’s humanity, Yonas’ responsibility, Dawit’s ideals will all be tested. As if working pieces of an intricate puzzle, Maaza presents an epic historical moment too few of us know of, laying the most atrocious acts next to radiantly tender moments and juxtaposing utter cowardice with utmost bravery. The result proves unforgettable.
Based on the strength of that single novel, Maaza was chosen by the 10×10 team to write the Ethiopian chapter of the 10×10 documentary film. Her enthusiasm about the project is palpable, and she admits she is most excited about connecting to the Ethiopian girls. Almost shyly, she reveals her own experiences when, at age 7, she left the comfort of her family to escape the growing danger of remaining in Ethiopia and traveled alone to the United States as a tiny refugee. For over a decade, she grew up in a group home run by a Christian couple in a small town in Colorado: “No one has ever heard of it; it’s on the border with Kansas,” she says. She remained there, living with a revolving group of other refugees, until she graduated high school and left for college.
Maaza softly admits to her isolated youth as “difficult, and I wouldn’t want to wish it on anyone.” She adds, “maybe that’s why I feel so connected to the plight of children.” [... click here for more: author interview appears on pages 5-11]
Author interview: 10×10: Educate Girls, Change the World Book Club Kit, April 2011, pages 5-11
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, translated by Michael Hofmann
In early 1940s wartime Berlin, an official letter arrives for Otto and Anna Quangel with the unbearable news that their only son is dead. Anna immediately rejects “‘those common lies … [t]hat he died a hero’s death for Führer and Fatherland’” – and in that instant, the Quangels’ lives are changed forever. Their overwhelming grief will eventually manifest into brave acts of civil disobedience that will both provide the couple a reason to live, but also lead to violent death.
Otto, a quiet factory foreman bewildered by the growing inhumanity all around him, realizes he can’t overthrow the Nazi regime alone, but he can – and will – protest in his own small way. “Mother! The Führer has murdered my son,” his first postcard screams. And, as a petrified Anna bears witness and waits, Otto drops the traitorous card in the stairwell of a public building and walks away. His fervent hope – that his message will resonate, protests might multiply and, sooner than later, topple the evil Führer forever.
Over the two years that Otto and Anna secretly continue their postcard-protests, life devolves into terror. While some neighbors become brutally abusive Nazis, others hope to save the persecuted. Still others are willing to bargain, bribe, betray their friends and colleagues without a second thought. For far too many, survival during one of the worst periods of history comes at too high a price.
As stunningly epic as this novel is, the story surrounding its publication is equally striking, and is included in a 30 page-appendix at book’s end. Otto and Anna are based on the real lives of Otto and Elise Hampel, whose official Gestapo file – complete with police reports, signed statements, photos, and even some of the notorious postcards – was given to Hans Fallada, post-war, by a well-connected friend.
Hans Fallada was a pseudonym (taken from two Grimm’s Fairy Tales, “Hans in Luck” and “The Goose Girl” which features a horse named Falada) for prolific German writer Rudolf Ditzen. His troubled personal history included unintended murder, insane asylums, drug and alcohol addiction, and imprisonment. He wrote Every Man in just 24 days, but did not live to see the book published in 1947. It was then one of the first anti-Nazi titles ever. Another six decades-plus passed before it was translated into English, in 2009, when it became an unexpected international bestselling phenomenon thanks to the renegade indie publisher Melville House.
Yes, the novel is an agonizing record of the failure of humanity … but it also proves to be a necessary reminder that among the masses are always, always, the heroes who somehow have the unwavering strength to just say ‘no.’
Readers: Adult
Published: 1947 (Germany); 2009 (United States; in the United Kingdom as Alone in Berlin) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Translation, European
Seasons of Flight by Manjushree Thapa
Nepal-born Manjushree Thapa, herself a peripatetic hybrid of East and West with an American education and Canadian ties, is one of a handful of Nepali authors successfully writing in English. This, her latest novel (and only her second in her almost two-decade writing history with seven titles thus far), is not yet published in the U.S., although thanks to our global economy, it’s readily available through various virtual outlets. While the book itself has not yet officially landed with a U.S. press, Flight – ironically – is essentially an immigration story, enhanced with resonating layers of political and socioeconomic history.
“Why were Americans so light of spirit?” Prema, a young woman from Nepal, asks herself again and again. Having survived her war-torn, unstable homeland where loved ones die and disappear, Prema’s adjustment to her new life in Los Angeles is a wholly different kind of challenge.
Trained in forestry – in things that might change with the seasons, but are ultimately rooted – Prema’s life in her native hill village is not enough to keep her grounded: her mother died in childbirth when Prema was 8, that younger sister who survived went missing years ago to join the rebel Maoists, her father is little more than a kind voice on a public telephone, her lover is as noncommittal as Prema herself. When she is granted a U.S. green card via lottery, she readily flees toward a chance for a “life in a richer land [that] was more – proper, solid.”
But in the multi-ethnic metropolis that is Los Angeles, Prema finds herself repeatedly trying to explain that she is not Indian, and she doesn’t speak Spanish because she is not Mexican/Italian/Spanish, that ‘Nepal’ is not the same as Nippon nor does it sound like ‘nipple’ and surely it has no relation to Naples or pasta. Untethered, Prema eschews relationships with fellow Nepali emigres, and cuts off contact with her waiting father and unattached lover. She moves in with total strangers, cares for a wealthy elderly widow most days, and finds herself alone most nights … until she meets Luis, who becomes her tenuous connection to a firmer, more grounded American life, at least for a while. But reinvention, even thousands of miles away, requires more than physical distance.
In a poignant twist, Thapa subtly compares the two sisters’ lives – eight years and countries apart. As spare as those passages are, their markedly diverging circumstances and experiences speak volumes, giving this not-so-simple immigration story keen insight into the cost of leaving, and the price for going back.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 (India, United Kingdom) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, Nepali, Nepali American, South Asian, South Asian American
The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht
With the gushing acknowledgement of her debut novel – 2011 Orange Prize, 2011 National Book Award finalist, enthusiastic thumbs up from the New Yorker, New York Times, and too many starred reviews to count – Téa Obreht is already a renowned wunderkind.
Always curious about that level of fuss, I finally picked up the novel, and stuck it into my ears (narrated by veteran audible regulars Susan Duerden and Robin Sachs). Perhaps that’s where I went wrong … perhaps this is fiction meant only to be read, not listened to. Still, I’m compelled to out myself as quite possibly the only person on the planet who thinks the overwhelming hype surrounding Tiger’s Wife is more hyperbole than substance.
Here’s the story – three, actually, to be more precise: 1. Young Dr. Natalia takes a detour from her work at an orphanage across the border to collect the few belongings of her beloved grandfather who has unexpectedly died far from home; 2. Natalia’s grandfather shares his memories of “the deathless man,” a mysterious stranger who never aged and, no matter what, could never die; and 3. Natalia uncovers her grandfather’s childhood tale of the abused, deaf, mute woman known as ‘the tiger’s wife.’
So here’s what I ultimately got from the cleverly intertwining narrative strands: wunderkind Obreht (born in 1985, making her barely in her mid-20s) has no problem putting together gorgeous, mellifluous sentences. She will, without a shadow of a doubt, write even more amazing, more accomplished books in the years to come. But my bottom line … in spite of the gorgeous prose and the epic stories, Tiger’s Wife in the end, just didn’t move me.
No characters stood out as spectacular, in spite of the spectacular things that happened to many of them. The remembrances of things past – especially of war and the price of survival – felt too distanced and detached to resonate. Natalia’s grandmother is too shrill, her mother strangely absent, Natalia too self-absorbed in her endless ruminations about what might or might not be happening. Even the mythic characters of her grandfather’s childhood – the eponymous tiger’s wife, her desperately abusive husband, the legendary bear man, the wandering apothecary – hardly lived up to their potential uniqueness.
Perhaps three stories in one were too much for one novel. Which only proves Obreht must have the imagination for many more. My current disappointment aside, for now the waiting begins for what is surely to come …
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, European
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