Asian American Literature Fans Megareview for September 26 2012

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Asian American Literature Fans Megareview for September 26 2012

In this post, reviews of: Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan (Simon & Schuster, 2012); David Yoo’s The Choke Artist (Grand Central Publishing, 2012); Alex Kuo’s Panda Diaries (University of Indianapolis Press, 2006); Henry Chang’s Chinatown Beat (Soho Press, 2007) and Year of the Dog (Soho Press, 2008); Kim Sunee’s Trail of Crumbs (Grand Central Publishing 2008); Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (Vintage, 2001); John Hamamura’s Color of the Sea (Anchor, 2007).

A Review of Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan (Simon & Schuster, 2012).



I believe Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan is the first novel written by an American author of Cambodian ancestry. Cambodian American literature has been perhaps not surprisingly dominated by the memoir and autobiography as a form; there was one chapbook that I recall reading as well by Sarith Peou that came out of Tinfish Press called Corpse Watching.

skim666 has already posted two megareviews on the Cambodian American memoir; they can be found here:

http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/134888.html

http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/133322.html

Interestingly enough, Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan concludes with an author’s note where she basically reveals that the story of a young girl named Raami who survives the reign of the Khmer Rouge. The choice then to fictionalize much of her own life is an interesting one and it seems that based upon the author’s note that her decision was largely related to the fact that she had to compress certain events together. Part of the issue is clearly related to the fact that Ratner is attempting to convey a story that will in part be enthralling to readers, which begs the question of how audience and capital ultimately influence and perhaps even distort the way that historical events can be represented. In any case, the novel basically follows Raami’s harrowing journey as she is moved from one location to another, basically separated from more and more family members, until she is practically by herself for long periods, doing whatever task that the revolutionary soldiers are forcing her to do. She must endure several incredible tragedies: her father is taken away and assumed to have been executed for his intellectual-class background, her Uncle kills himself, her Grandmother (named Grandmother Queen) goes insane having endure living with the dead bodies of family members (Uncle’s wife and children). Raami’s sister Radana dies from malaria; this occurs due to the fact that Radana was left without supervision for sometime and is exposed to the elements. By the conclusion of the narrative, of the core family members who had begun the flight from Phnom Penh, only Raami and her mother are actually alive. If it seems like the novel is a brutal read, it really is, but there are moments when Ratner punctuates the traumas being endured with beautiful descriptions of the landscape that almost pop up unbidden. These passages perhaps amplify the aesthetic of trauma in that we cannot quite comprehend the juxtaposition of impressive vistas against the constant fear of torture and execution. The other element to consider is the nature of retrospective narration. The novel is told in the first person past tense and it is only until the very ending where we get a sense that the story is being told retrospectively. Indeed, we understand quite intuitively from the very beginning that the narrative cannot really be told from such a young girl’s perspective, which makes us wonder about why the revelation concerning the retrospective aspect until the end? In any case, I plan to teach this novel in the fall and some of these questions are sure to be a part of my discussion. If you have secondary materials that you would recommend to read alongside this novel, just let me know.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/In-Shadow-Banyan-A-Novel/dp/1451657706/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345949356&sr=8-1&keywords=In+the+Shadow+of+the+Banyan

A Review of David Yoo’s The Choke Artist (Grand Central Publishing, 2012).




In Confessions of a Choke Artist, David Yoo, author of a number of young adult fictions (including The Detention Club, which was earlier reviewed on Asian American literature fans), turns to a little bit of navel-gazing in a comic memoir that speaks to an individual crumbling under the burdens of the model minority stereotype. I’ve always admired those willing to write memoirs simply for the fact that it is ultimately such an intimate form—to really pen an engaging work, one must be willing to plumb potentially embarrassing or difficult moments in life. Yoo excels in this area. He admits to, for instance, his insecurity over his masculinity, heterosexuality, and his racial difference, a combination that results in his attempts to woo a number of different girls. In the later years of high school and college, Yoo attempts to aggressively change his physique as a way to measure up to his conceptions of the masculine ideal. He explores his thorny relationship with his family, one made complicated by the fact that his older sister is the poster girl for the model minority stereotype, especially when she later is admitted to and attends Yale. Further still, given his inclination to bounce around from one temp job to another, his career trajectory seems rather desultory. Yoo finds it difficult to ever find favor in his parents’ eyes; in one tragicomic chapter, he returns home for his father’s birthday to discover that his father has taken on what seems to be a surrogate son. Another chapter explores how Yoo once hoodwinked a coworker into believing he was actually Japanese. Perhaps, though, one of the most important moments in the memoir occurs quite late when Yoo must consider his racial identity with respect to his creative interests: “Was I shying away from writing about myself? Maybe I was leery of being tagged an ethnic writer. The fact that I could spot a novel written by an Asian writer from a mile away at the bookstore did grate on me—always that bambooish font, or at least a serpentine flair to the jacket design, and I knew the insiders were going to be littered with italicized Asian entrees” (252). Though Yoo finds himself steering clear of any Orientalist impulses, he comes to realize that he “never finished’ some of his stories “because the narrators’ motivations never made any sense, thereby rending them unlikable” (252). Yoo adds that such stories “were merely flimsily disguised masks for the story I really wanted to write, about a twentysomething Asian guy trying to come to terms with a lifetime of self-loathing” (262). In this final goal, Yoo’s The Choke Artist brilliantly succeeds and manages to put a large dent into the model minority ethos that has cast such a large shadow over Asian Americans everywhere.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Choke-Artist-Confessions-Underachiever/dp/0446573450/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343067090&sr=8-1&keywords=David+Yoo


A Review of Timeri N. Murari’s The Taliban Cricket Club (Ecco, 2012).



Timeri N. Murari’s novels The Taliban Cricket Club certainly should be noted for its wonderful title, a narrative whose interesting premise involves the Taliban’s attempt to restore its international image by forming its own cricket team. Murari is the author of a number of novels and other publications, most of which have not seen publication in the states (these include The Imperial Agent and The Last Victory). The Taliban Cricket Club is told in the first person by an enterprising female journalist, Rukhsana, who lives in Afghanistan. The novel’s early plot involves Rukhsana discovering that she must report on the Taliban’s attempts to reform its image through the construction of cricket clubs, who will then represent the country in international competitions. Rukhsana’s life is turned upside down when a Talib Leader named Wahidi desires to marry her. Though Rukhsana is already promised to a man named Shaheen (who has left the country), Wahidi and his ally Droon look to make Rukhsana’s life a literal living hell. Of course, no romance plot would be complete without more drama; Rukhsana herself still has feelings for an Indian man named Veer that she met while completing some university schooling in India. It is while in India that Rukhsana also learns to play cricket, so when she decides to disguise herself as a man named Babur in order to escape the attentions of the Talib who are after her, she puts these skills to use in coaching the local team in cricket. Murari’s story is based upon an actual social context in which the Taliban attempted to reconstruct its image through the sport of cricket competitions. Murari’s novel finds its political texture especially through the plight of free journalism under the regime of the Taliban as well as the general oppression that the many Afghan characters experience during that period. Though Murari does have a very intriguing overarching plotline, one of the challenges of reading through this narrative appears in the use of flashback sequences that can sometimes abruptly shift the flow. This novel clearly adds to the growing interest by South Asian Anglophone writers concerning their proximity to the Middle East and this novel could easily be read alongside Jamil Ahmad’s The Wandering Falcon, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s The Watch, and Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil.


Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Taliban-Cricket-Club-Novel/dp/0062091255/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345135909&sr=8-1&keywords=Taliban+Cricket+Club


A Review of Alex Kuo’s Panda Diaries (University of Indianapolis Press, 2006).



I have always appreciated Alex Kuo’s rather satirical and darkly comic writings. In Panda Diaries, Kuo explores conceptions of preservation, especially as related to indigenous communities and endangered species in China. Of course, what seems to be the literal issues at play in the novel are masking the issue of “preserving” or even allowing for political freedoms. The main character, Colonel Ge, is a fascinating character who must consider how to respond to the increasing militarism directed at Tiananmen Square dissidents. He is in a complicated marriage to an academic who believes that her intellectual pursuits are being stymied by the assumption that her work is too bourgeous and elitist. They are both so focused on their careers that they arrive at particular social events separately, as they are often acting in official and professional capacities. They have one young son and when Ge’s wife considers taking a position at a different institution, they must make a difficult decision about how to negotiate their careers with respect to their personal lives. Perhaps, though, the most interesting element in this novel is the early period of Ge’s life, the years he spent with an indigenous group known as the Oroqens and the surreal inclusion of another character, Panda, that serves as a useful foil for Ge, as he sorts out his next move. At one point, the narrator reveals: “There are now more than 10,000 Oroqens. Since the government started helping them in 1951, six have graduated from college, sixty-four from technical schools, and more than two hundred from high school. Some of them have become teachers and government officials, and every year Oroqen singers, dancers, and storytellers travel to Beijing in October to perform in the National Day celebrations at Tiananmen Square in front of Premier Li Peng and state television cameras” (70). The discourse of cultural preservation being considered here is compared against the nature of political oppression during the same period; how does a the nation-state then reconcile certain policies and approaches toward bio-regulation the novel seems to ask us? What is the purpose of preservation at all and how does it promote its own form of violence and brutality? Of course, Kuo is always pushing boundaries in other ways. The final sequence of this fictional work is actually an alphabetically oriented poem, linking various “animal” type words together from “albatross” to “yak.” The dynamic wordplay reminds us of the Kuo’s intent to playfully critique how we attempt to taxonomically configure the world around us.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Panda-Diaries-Alex-Kuo/dp/088093865X/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1338057787&sr=8-1

A Review of Henry Chang’s Chinatown Beat (Soho Press, 2007) and Year of the Dog (Soho Press, 2008).



So, I somehow “lost” my copy of Chinatown Beat and Year of the Dog in the black hole of my office. This event has encouraged me to engage a large office purge and I’ve begun to toss out and give away a number of books that I haven’t read in quite a long time. In the process, I found Chinatown Beat and Year of the Dog. I read Chinatown Beat after Year of the Dog, so there was a little bit of readerly disorientation for me. In this particular work, Jack Yu is still working the titular Chinatown beat. His connections to the local Chinatown area allow him to engage his various investigations with a different perspective. There are a number of different issues that come up. On the one hand, a very powerful underworld boss, Uncle Four, is murdered. On the other, there is a serial rapist of young Chinese American children on the loose. Jack is tasked to help solve both cases. Jack must employ whatever tools he has to his advantage. There is his long ago childhood friend, Lucky, who has now become a Chinatown mob boss. There is Alexandra Chow, an employee at a progressive political organization who finds the police officers to be cogs in the wheel of true justice. There is Ah Por, the Chinatown elder who possesses occult knowledge that may be able to point him in the right directions. Chang has an interesting writing style. He uses a third person omniscient perspective that shifts from one character to another. This mode can sometimes be confusing, but it does allow us to follow a wonderful femme fatale character named Mona who seeks to turn the tables on the various men who have taken advantage of her over and over again. Some of the reviews I briefly browsed describe this novel as noirish and this novel both relishes in that form but also explodes it precisely because Jack is able to access Chinatown in a way his fellow police officers often cannot. One of the most pivotal scenes occurs when Jack is able to get a Chinatown resident to allow him to interview a relative who has been sexually assaulted, in part because he happens to be Chinese and possesses linguistic and cultural facility to keep the family at ease. Chinatown Beat is a particularly notable and auspicious beginning to the Jack Yu series and the conclusion sees Jack exiting the local precinct for a different part of New York City.




I actually accidentally started the Jack Yu series with mystery #2, Year of the Dog. I was really surprised this novel, which was certainly noirish in character, but had much less of a traditional detective mystery plot to it. There are many dead bodies, but there aren’t always clear indicators of who perpetrated the crimes. In this novel, detective Jack Yu is outside of the Chinatown precinct, but still realizes how deep his connections to Chinatown still remain: “Jack felt it again, the tension at the back of his neck, the reasons why he had to leave the Fifth Precinct. The Chinatown way, the Chinese mistrust of policemen and government officials, a historical divide covering centuries of corruption in China and Hong Kong, where they’d refined corruption to an art form” (emphasis original, 60). If there is the presence of an old world way, this novel is intent in showing us, as with any great noir, that the divide between heroes and villains is always a little bit murky and that justice is just as difficult to pinpoint. Further still, his boyhood friend, Lucky, who is now part of an organized crime cartel looks to maintain control over the various Chinatown gangs. Embroiled in all of this is a bookie dying of cancer named Sai Go, who also has one of the most poignant narrative arcs in his relationship with an aging, single mother named Bo. The novel is particularly notable for its attention to the contemporary social contexts for New York City’s Chinatown and is reminiscent of Ed Lin’s Robert Chow detective series. For instance, the novel reveals how the demographics of the Chinese immigrant populations have changed with a larger percentage coming being of Fukienese background. Likewise, the organized crime rings must attend to this shift in the immigrant population and look to exploit any possible immigration dynamics. Thus, Chang’s primary goal in writing this novel seems to be an exploration of these organized crime dynamics and how they can embroil not only criminals and police officers, but also more ordinary individuals who get caught in the crossfire.

Eventually, after all is said and done, I hope the office purge will produce book three of the series entitled Red Jade!

Buy the Books Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Chinatown-Beat-Detective-Jack-Yu/dp/1569474788/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1348554620&sr=1-1&keywords=Henry+Chang

http://www.amazon.com/Year-Dog-Henry-Chang/dp/B005M50GD4/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1348554620&sr=1-3&keywords=Henry+Chang

A Review of Kim Sunee’s Trail of Crumbs (Grand Central Publishing 2008).



It’s been awhile since I’ve reviewed a memoir. This one will be relatively short, but I just wanted to say that Trail of Crumbs is an interesting addition to the KAAD (Korean American Adoptee) literature in that it does not focus so much on questions of the birth family, but rather on how one constructs new kinships, when one is “orphaned.” I put the word “orphan” in quotations only because the circumstances of Kim Sunee’s background are hazy at best, as she is left in an open air market, and later placed in an orphanage. She is then adopted by an American G.I. and his wife and grow ups in New Orleans. While her relationship to her adopted family is not always optimal, Kim Sunee’s narrative nevertheless draws much emotional force from this intial concept of kinship. From New Orleans, Kim Sunee is drawn to France and from there the bulk of the memoir is spent on the complicated relationship with Olivier Baussan, the founder of the cosmetics company, L’Occitane. While Olivier is quite well off, his control over her is certainly alarming, but given Kim Sunee’s still developing sense of self, she does not find his controlling ways to be too problematic at first. Interspersed with her search for “home,” Kim Sunee includes original recipes. At first, I was a little bit perplexed at their inclusion, but given the fact that the memoir is invested in psychoanalysis, one can’t help but think her turn to cooking is one way in which to address the hunger she has felt for a stable domestic life. Because Kim Sunee’s voice is so assured and her style so poetic, the memoir succeeds even when the narrative starts to meander toward the conclusion.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Trail-Crumbs-Hunger-Love-Search/dp/0446697907/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1284087464&sr=8-1

A Review of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (Vintage, 2001)



This review is going to be on the very short side. I am considering teaching Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost this fall in a course on trauma theory and Asian American literature. Ondaatje is always hard to situate from a US context, but because parts of this book are set in the U.S., I believe it can be at least elliptically related in this way. Nevertheless, most of the book is actually set in Sri Lanka. The main character is Anil Tissera, a forensic anthropologist, who returns to Sri Lanka to help identify ancient bones. Among these bones are ones that are significantly “newer.” Indeed, a set of bones belongs to a person who had died recently and the book is propelled in part by the quest Anil takes to identify this individual (who is nicknamed Sailor). I found the novel absolutely fascinating and look forward to potentially having discussions about the vexed politics surrounding the Sri Lankan Civil War context and its depiction within the fictional landscape.

Buy the Book here:

http://www.amazon.com/Anils-Ghost-Novel-Michael-Ondaatje/dp/0375724370/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277265230&sr=8-1

A Review of John Hamamura’s Color of the Sea (Anchor, 2007).



This novel has been sitting on my shelf for a couple of years. I’ve been waiting to dust it off to read it, but it wasn’t the right time to read it yet. Color of the Sea is a historical fiction in that it is set roughly 20th century. The narrative revolves for the most part around Sam Hamada, who arrives in Hawaii as a young man of 9, joining his father for work on plantations. He eventually moves to Lodi, California, a small agricultural town outside of Sacramento, populated in part by Sam’s relatives and by other Japanese Americans. There he meets a woman named Keiko, who becomes his main romantic interest. An earlier, but serious dalliance with the daughter of a madam leads Sam to believe he is already betrothed, leading to the novel’s most unsuccessful sequence. Here, the novel struggles to overcome some of the more maudlin aspects of the romance plot, but nevertheless later finds surer footing in the final sequence, which inevitably includes the problematic events that lead up to and include World War II. Despite the fact that the plot must tread such perilous territories and we obviously worry for the fate of many characters, Hamamura has an obvious gift with a kind of historical narrating voice, which certainly draws in readerly interests. Color of the Sea adds to the rich and growing tradition of sansei-generation Japanese American writers who have been considering the internment camp experience directly within their cultural productions.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Color-Sea-John-Hamamura/dp/0307386074/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1348554284&sr=1-1&keywords=John+Hamamura