Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for October 5 2014

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Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for October 5 2014

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide ranging and expansive terrain of Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

In this post, reviews of Wendy Law-Yone’s The Road To Wanting (Chatto & Windus, 2010); Tosca Lee’s The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen (Howard Books, 2014); Sandeep Jauhar’s Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2014); Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors (St. Martin’s Press, 2014); Kat Zhang’s Echoes of Us (Harper, 2014); Sherry Thomas’s The Perilous Sea (Balzer + Bray, 2014).

A Review of Wendy Law-Yone’s The Road To Wanting (Chatto & Windus, 2010)



Though Wendy Law-Yone’s third novel The Road To Wanting (longlisted for the UK’s prestigious Orange Prize) has yet to come out stateside, occasionally there are surreptitious ways of getting one’s hands on a review copy (*grins*). Law-Yone’s The Road to Wanting is long awaited for most fans of Asian American literature, as her first two critically acclaimed works have for the most part held a very distinguished place in the canon for the fact that there are so few fictional representations of Burmese transnational contexts. Fortunately, The Road to Wanting continues Law-Yone’s incisive and unsentimentalized depictions of social issues that have arisen in Burma (and follows the trajectory of her first two novels in this way), especially in light of the country’s military governance, clan tensions (the ethnographic detail is an important element of this novel), and economic instabilities. Law-Yone’s narrator is Na Ga, a placeholder name for a girl from the Wild Lu clan. As a young child, she is sold off to another family, then sold again and again in different contexts and situations. At the core of Law-Yone’s work then is the plight of human trafficking. The novel is anachronically constructed. The opening of the novel sees the narrator in a border town between China and Burma; she’s languishing in a hotel, waiting for the right time to cross into Burma through the help of a guide named Mr. Jiang. But Na Ga doesn’t want to go back and she plans to kill herself (her noose is ready to go), only having to discover that someone else has beat her to the punch. Indeed, she discovers that Mr. Jiang has already killed himself. This moment gives her pause to think about her actions and of course to reflect upon her life to that point, which is told in retrospectives throughout the novel. We come to understand that she’s at the border because her American sponsor, Will, has effectively cast her out from his home (in Thailand), and he’s encouraged her and financed her way back into Burma. She’s more than reluctant to go of course; her time with Will was not unlike an idyllic period she had as a child when she was fortuitously taken in by an American couple who had settled for a time in Rangoon. The “road to Wanting” is a title meant to invoke Na Ga’s terrifying and unpredictable journey to this border town, but Law-Yone is obviously playing off the idea of “wanting” as lack. Na Ga, who has survived so much, does not have any biological kin to come back to in Burma, so the question becomes: what purpose does it serve to go back to Burma? This question is a larger and perhaps more metaphorical one being posed by Law-Yone, who understands that going back to a “home” country does not necessarily come with it feelings of comfort or nostalgia. Indeed, as Na Ga makes her way to the border, she understands exilic trajectories come in many and often disastrous forms. For Na Ga, exit from Burma comes at the price of her sexual freedom. Indeed, we discover through flashbacks that, having been left behind by the American couple and moved to a smaller city in Burma (alongside the servant who originally took her in and brought her to that American couple), she comes to realize that she wants a different life. At 16, fixers come to town looking for young women who would then be brought back to major cities as factory workers, but as we learn, these fixers are really human traffickers and Na Ga is essentially sold as a sex slave and transferred to Thailand. Thus, when Will, an American, sponsors Na Ga through what is probably an NGO type organization (in the wake of her brothel being raided and closed), she believes she may have found the start to a better life. But Law-Yone understands her protagonist well; Na Ga is fearful that Will’s companionship is transitory and constantly looks for signs that he is tiring of her. Eventually he does, which leaves her in the border town with no money and a ticket into Burma, the very land in which her own father originally sold her as a young child to pay for debts. What can Burma hold, the novel asks? But Law-Yone does offer a sliver of possibility. As Na Ga comes to understand, her connections in the border town are deeper than she realizes, and the political textures of the novel become enriched by an unexpected and deeply moving concluding sequence. The ending is far from optimistic but leaves our protagonist with more than one to thing to live for and a sense of purpose that perhaps portends a more agential future life. There was an approximately 15 year gap between this novel and her last, so we’ll hope that we won’t have to wait as long for the next!

More about the Book Here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E49Wt0Ldkg

A Review of Tosca Lee’s The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen (Howard Books, 2014).



I’m trying this new thing of reading three or four books at once, being in different stages of each and generally seeing if this approach helps unexpected relationalities to spark. Tosca Lee’s follow-up to Iscariot (reviewed here on Asian American Literature Fans) is The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen. Prior to opening the book, I did not know much about Sheba and did my requisite Wikipedia-esque level internet research. Lee picked a very intriguing historical figure and one particularly malleable to her preferred mode of storytelling, which are fictional reconstructions of actual individuals (most often with a Biblical foundation). In the case of Sheba, there is no definitive narrative concerning her life, and scholars often debate the location of her kingdom (in what is modern day Yemen or Ethiopia, for instance) as well as the power of her hold on the crown. Lee’s depiction begins with Bilqis (one of the versions of Sheba’s name) living under the royal eye of her father, but once her mother dies, her father takes a new wife. This new wife does not seem to care much for Bilqis and attempts to marry her off soon enough, but Bilqis’s new husband is soon killed during a flood. Bilqis requests to leave at that point, hoping to start a new life somewhere else, beyond the watchful gaze of her stepmother. But once her father’s health takes a turn for the worse, and it becomes apparent that her stepmother has used her association to the king to secure as much power for herself and her relatives/ tribal connections, Bilqis is called upon to unite the groups/ clans opposed to the stepmother. Bilqis triumphs and so begins her reign as queen of Saba. Once in the palace as queen, her position as a female monarch is often unstable. Should she marry in order to provide an heir? What kind of relationship will she hold with other men who are her advisors? How will she be able to lead and unite a people who had subsisted under turmoil and civil conflict? And then there’s the issue of King Solomon who has just come to power and who is threatening Saba’s trade routes. Bilqis must operate with diplomacy and gamesmanship in mind as she tries to figure out why King Solomon so obstinately wishes to have her come to visit and offer tribute to him. Bilqis, understanding that the future of her reign is at stake, spends a considerable amount of time figuring out what the best possible decision will be. Eventually, she decides she must make the arduous (many months long) journey to see King Solomon and try to put an end to their stalemate. Once in Solomon’s kingdom, Bilqis is confused by a perceived ambivalence by Solomon and must once again try to divine what it is she must do in order to curry the proper amount of favor without having to relinquish any major power she already holds. As with Iscariot, Lee had to complete some considerable research, not only evident in the narrative itself, that emerges in very interesting author’s note which concludes the book. Much of the knowledge concerning the Queen of Saba (or Sheba) is lacking, so Lee does have some room to create her own spin on her tale in which a potential romance between Solomon and Bilqis is perhaps the boldest move she makes in her configuration of the story. Of course, the whole issue of a female monarch is absolutely foundational to Lee’s version, and Lee’s take on this story does cast a very politically invested light in the issue of gender and power. Bilqis, for instance, must continually deal with any sort of rumor that suggests that she might be consorting with a man who is not an appropriate match for her. Bilqis is well aware of the double standard being levied against her at these times, and thus the novel is in some respects especially germane to the continued conservative norms that often divide women and men in issues related to governance and leadership. Lee chooses an intriguing story to flesh out and readers of Biblical themes and Oriental tales will find much to adore in Lee’s latest religiously grounded offering.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Legend-Sheba-Rise-Queen/dp/1451684045/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412179067&sr=8-1&keywords=queen+of+sheba+rise+of+a+queen


A Review of Sandeep Jauhar’s Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2014)



For those with some knowledge of the healthcare system, Sandeep Jauhar’s Doctored—part memoir, part sociological/ journalistic treatise—may not necessarily provide much new formation. Indeed, this work follows within the established concerns of the managed care approach that has left both medical care personnel and their patients struggling. Doctors are getting paid less than ever before, have less control than ever before, while having to squeeze in patients in a time schedule where they have little chance to establish the kind of rapport they would prefer. But what makes this work rise above is of course Jauhar’s personal insights and experiences, especially related to moments during which his own family must engage with the medical care system. The birth of a son, for instance, creates some tension as he and his wife must negotiate whether or not to deal with a tricky Caesarean section. Jauhar further realizes that the kind of life he wants to lead with his family is ultimately incommensurate with the urban lifestyle that he has for so long idealized. Indeed, one day he understands that Manhattan is not for him. A moment where he tries to cross a large street filled with traffic just to find a shortcut to a tennis court proves to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Along the way out to the surburbs, Jauhar realizes that he can neither be a mercenary nor can be he an unrealistic dreamer believing in his ability to change the system one patient at a time. The sobering reality Jauhar comes to understand is that there will be no one answer to changing the system and in the meantime, all that he and other doctors can do is maintain their commitment to the patient’s health and work within the constraints of a flawed healthcare structure. As Jauhar writes near the conclusion: “People often think of doctors as either consumedly avaricious or impossibly altruistic. There is a disconnect between how the lay world views medicine and how doctors experience it from the inside” (258). Indeed, Jauhar effectively shows that it is impossible to stay at either pole and that the doctor, at the end of the day, must find some way to exert some choice in the roles that he or she will play. Jauhar makes his choice: “It’s the tender moments helping people in need. In the end, medicine is about taking care of people in their most vulnerable state and making yourself a bit in the same in the process” (260). We can only hope that the next generation of doctors stick by a similar credo and help transform the system, bit by bit, over the course of the long haul.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Doctored-The-Disillusionment-American-Physician/dp/0374141398/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410566993&sr=8-1&keywords=Sandeep+Jauhar

A Review of Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors (St. Martin’s Press, 2014).



Like Bilal Tanweer’s The Scatter Here is Too Great, Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors was one of the finalists for the Man Booker Literary Prize, but that was in 2012 and Munaweera’s novel was not published until just this summer in the United States. And thank the literary gods it finally has dropped stateside! Munaweera’s debut explores the intricate and thorny politics of Sri Lankan family building in the era of tensions between the Tamils and the Sinhala. It has much in common with the larger corpus of works and writers who have mined this territory, including Roma Tearne’s The Mosquito, Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, V.V. Ganeshenanthan’s Love Marriage, and Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy. The novel is told from the perspective of Yasodhara, but the novel starts with an interesting conceit in that Yasodhara takes the time to narrate how her parents’ marriage comes to be, thus imitating a sort of third person limited omniscient storyteller. Her father and mother come from separate parts of the island. Her father is raised by a domineering mother who hopes that he will amount to something great, and she plans to marry him off to someone of great standing. Her mother Visaka is also raised by a strong mother figure. Visaka at first falls in love with a Sinhala boarder, living with her family in the wake of her father’s death and the fact of the family’s bankruptcy, but she will later be married off to Yasodhara’s father. But, we know given the ethnoracial divisions plaguing the Tamils and the Sinhala that the novel will soon move into a darker direction. Yasodhara is born on the same day as Shiva; Shiva’s mother is none other than the woman who would marry Visaka’s first love, the Sinhala man who lives upstairs. Because they go into labor on the same day, Visaka and Shiva’s mother end up in a tentative friendship and Shiva ends up becoming a kind of surrogate brother to Yasodhara and Yasodhara’s younger sister Lanka. When riots and other massacres begin to occur, Yasodhara’s family packs up and moves to Los Angeles, first meeting up with Visaka’s older brother, who had married a Burgher woman and then moved to the states. Book I ends with Yasodhara having acclimated to the United States and envisioning a full life beyond Sri Lanka. Book II begins with a radical shift in narrative perspective. It is told from the first person viewpoint of a young Tamil teenager named Sarawasthi; her family is being torn apart by the ethnoracial conflict. Two of Saraswathi’s brothers had already been recruited into the Tamil insurgency and died. Another brother named Kumar is drafted. Later, Saraswathi will be gang-raped, and this event forces her into the Tamil army, where she learns of what it means to be a revolutionary and to die for a political cause. The connection between narrative perspectives seems at first rather diffuse; Sarawasthi takes classes from the women who is possibly Yasodhara’s maternal grandmother (Muriel Spencer). Later, these competing narratives perspectives will see-saw against one another, creating an asymmetrical storytelling discourse that generates much anxiety in the reader. Yasodhara will have returned to Sri Lanka in the wake of a disintegrating marriage and is reunited with her childhood friend Shiva, while also re-establishing her relationship with her younger sister, as they teach at a local school. Saraswathi, for her part, is determined to become a martyr for the tigers. The novel ends a bit too quickly in my opinion. But bibliophiles, one must pick up the book simply for the incredibly luminous prose, reminiscent of poetry, absolutely seductive in its depictions. I was enamored of the voice from the get-go, and the storytelling grounds a phenomenal debut novel. In terms of writing style, it is not unlike le thi diem thuys’ The Gangster We are All Looking for; both novels are structured in general vignettes. There is more narrative coherence to Munaweera’s work, but both writers work off of the density and lyricism of language, while at the same time constructing such politically engaged narratives. I’ll be certain to teach this book in the future.

For other similar titles based upon Sri Lankan tensions between Tamils and Sinhala, see: Roma Tearne’s The Mosquito, Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, V.V. Ganeshenanthan’s Love Marriage:

http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/115944.html (Roma Tearne, Mosquito)

http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/146643.html (Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost)

http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/102180.html (V.V. Ganeshenanthan, Love Marriage)


Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Island-Thousand-Mirrors-Nayomi-Munaweera/dp/125004393X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409410352&sr=8-1&keywords

A Review of Kat Zhang’s Echoes of Us (Harper, 2014)



Kat Zhang’s concluding installment of the Hybrid Chronicles is upon us! In Echoes Of Us, Addie and Eva return and are languishing in the shadow of the explosive events of book two. Along with a group of other hybrids on the run, they are constantly moving from one safe house to another, hoping for a lengthier solution and a way out of their status as fugitives. When Henri and Emalia go missing, it’s apparent that the group must move to another safe house, but they are found out and Peter seemingly gets shot (and killed), while another hybrid is captured. Addie and Eva are still able to escape and meet up with the remaining hybrids, but they know they are in trouble. With few resources and fewer options, they turn to a reporter for help. This reporter (named Marion) wants to work with the hybrids to get their story out. In addition, Marion promises what resources she can to keep the hybrids safe. In exchange, Marion requests that Addie and Eva go undercover at an institute for hybrids. Once there, they would surreptitiously document the goings-on with the use of a trusty little camera hidden within a ring. Addie and Eva would take the identity of an existing hybrid named Darcie Grey. Of course, things do not go as planned, but with the help of a former acquaintance, they are able to escape. From that point, the novel devolves into a sequence of subplots in which Addie and Eva are looking to get reunited with one character or another. Zhang is juggling a lot of balls here, trying to re-connect Addie and Eva their biological family, while making sure that all loose ends concerning minor characters and hybrids are fully fleshed out. Because there are so many different characters plunging off into different arenas, the concluding arc comes off as a bit unfocused and narrative momentum may be a question mark for some readers. The other element that comes up with respect to the narrative involves the question of foreigners. Zhang uses this term as a catch-all phrase for other countries, but it’s generally unclear what foreign means in the context of this novel, especially since the formation of national boundaries seems to have shifted in this fictional world. This murkiness leaves an important aspect of particularity untapped, leaving the fictional world a little bit too hazy and obscure. We should applaud Zhang for her unique concept, especially the political undertones that necessarily align the hybrids as symbols for social difference: the outcasts, the pariahs, the unfairly downtrodden. But the conclusion to the hybrid chronicles may still leave some readers feeling underwhelmed.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Echoes-Us-Hybrid-Chronicles-Book/dp/006211493X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410642793&sr=8-1&keywords=Kat+Zhang

A Review of Sherry Thomas’s The Perilous Sea (Balzer + Bray, 2014)



Sherry Thomas’s follow-up to The Burning Sky is The Perilous Sea, the second book in The Elemental Trilogy. The first installment saw Iolanthe Seabourne discovering that she is an elemental mage of rare power, so powerful in fact that she’s wanted by the very powerful and very evil Bane, who is leading Atlantis in order to find such magical individuals and sacrifice them so he can achieve immortality. Iolanthe’s man is none other than Prince Titus, who won’t let that happen and is determined to achieve his own destiny as the hero who will die attempting to defeat Bane. Titus relies on the visions of his now-dead mother Princess Ariadne, a gifted prophetess, who had foretold that Titus would one day have to team up with an elemental mage of great power if there was to be any chance to be able to defeat the great evil known as Bane. The second book places some big question marks in Princess Ariadne’s gift of prophecy, as Titus begins to wonder if the elemental mage of great power who was “the one” is in fact not Iolanthe but his schoolmate Wintervale. If such is the case, then Titus and Iolanthe’s destinies are in fact not intertwined at all, and Titus would have to place his attentions elsewhere and perhaps in that process also end his romance. This major storyline is intercut with another (which takes place approximately six weeks later). In this storyline two people are in the Sahara with no memory of who they are and whether or not they are allies or enemies to each other. They only know that they are being hunted by Atlantis and must put away any suspicions of each other if they are to escape unharmed. Thomas takes a big risk in having these chapters toggle between each other, especially as the reader’s attention is no doubt divided between these two very different storylines. There’s also quite a lot of revelations in the second installment, especially concerning various alliances, Iolanthe’s mysterious origins and birth family, and readers will have to be paying close attention to keep up with who is allied with whom, and what treasonous intentions certain characters may or may not be actually harboring. Many important characters from the first return including Kashkari, the Indian transnational, Lady Wintervale, Lady Callista, and even Master Haywood (yes, we do find out what’s happened to him). In any case, Thomas throws so much into the second act that some readers may balk at all that is going on. In addition to all of the plot-level revelations, Thomas is working within the conceits of the Oriental tale, the paranormal fantasy, the young adult fiction, as well as the requisite romance plot. Indeed, you not only have magic carpets, camels, and deserts (Oriental tales), but also sand wyverns, mages, magic wands (paranormal fantasy), teenagers (the boys at the boarding school who are engaging in ever important cricket matches), and lovebirds (Titus/ Iolanthe). There’s a lot to juggle and Thomas is certainly game, but even with all of these different elements thrown in, the conclusion to this installment reads more like a lead-up to the third book and doesn’t seem to stand on its own as a contained portion of the trilogy. Nevertheless, there is enough of a cliffhanger that, even if you weren’t fully on board with the second, you’ll want to stick around to find out what happens in the third. Will Titus be able to avoid his fate and thus allow Iolanthe and Titus to live happily ever after, while also defeating the supreme evil known as Bane? We’ll just have to wait and see, and then we’ll read.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Perilous-Sea-Elemental-Trilogy/dp/0062207326/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1412482751&sr=8-5&keywords=sherry+thomas