A Review of Mako Yoshikawa’s Secrets of the Sun (Mad Creek Books, 2024)

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

This one’s going to be a very short review of Mako Yoshikawa’s Secrets of the Sun. I managed to find a relatively affordable used copy of this one and wanted to give this book a shoutout. We reviewed one of Yoshikawa’s novels on AALF a long time ago, and I was really happy to see that she had published another full-length work. Let’s move to the marketing description: “Mako Yoshikawa’s father, Shoichi, was a man of contradictions. He grew up fabulously wealthy in prewar Japan but spent his final years living in squalor; he was a proper Japanese man who craved society’s approval yet cross-dressed; he was a brilliant Princeton University physicist and renowned nuclear fusion researcher, yet his career withered as his severe bipolar disorder tightened its grip. And despite his generosity and charisma, he was often violent and cruel toward those closest to him. Yoshikawa adored him, feared him, and eventually cut him out of her life, but after he died, she was driven to try to understand this extraordinarily complex man. In Secrets of the Sun, her search takes her through everything from the Asian American experience of racism to her father’s dedication to fusion energy research, from mental illness to the treatment of women in Japan, and more. Yoshikawa gradually discovers a life filled with secrets, searching until someone from her father’s past at last provides the missing piece in her knowledge: the story of his childhood. Secrets of the Sun is about a daughter’s mission to uncover her father’s secrets and to find closure in the shadow of genius, mental illness, and violence.”

 

I’ve slowly been making my way through a lot of Mad Creek titles, which is an imprint out of Ohio State University Press, and I’ve really loved them all. This one is no different despite being one of the most challenging, because Yoshikawa is truly working hard to find a way to understand her very difficult father who suffers from bipolar disorder. Despite the complicated feelings that Yoshikawa has for her father—and she indeed questions whether or not she has any truly deep feelings for him given their history—the extraordinary work of care is evident here, especially in the way that Yoshikawa works painstakingly to find out what might have driven her father to make some of the choices that he did. This investigative work will ultimately take her to Japan, where critical information from her father’s sister (her aunt) leads her to realize that she has not fully understood her his family background A stunning memoir that burns brightly and exposes the multifaceted contours of an Asian American family. 

 

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A Review of S.L. Huang’s The Water Outlaws (Tor, 2023)

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

It’s been a little bit of time since I reviewed anything by S.L. Huang, so it was great to be able to spend the last week reading her high fantasy book The Water Outlaws (Tor, 2023), which is a retelling of the classic Chinese novel Water Margin. Some names are the same; others are changed, and Huang takes the core idea from the earlier text and then remixes it with a lot of speculative elements: “Lin Chong is an expert arms instructor, training the Emperor's soldiers in sword and truncheon, battle axe and spear, lance and crossbow. Unlike bolder friends who flirt with challenging the unequal hierarchies and values of Imperial society, she believes in keeping her head down and doing her job. Until a powerful man with a vendetta rips that carefully-built life away. Disgraced, tattooed as a criminal, and on the run from an Imperial Marshall who will stop at nothing to see her dead, Lin Chong is recruited by the Bandits of Liangshan. Mountain outlaws on the margins of society, the Liangshan Bandits proclaim a belief in justice—for women, for the downtrodden, for progressive thinkers a corrupt Empire would imprison or destroy. They’re also murderers, thieves, smugglers, and cutthroats. Apart, they love like demons and fight like tigers. Together, they could bring down an empire.”

 

Admittedly, I haven’t read Water Margin, so I don’t know too much about how to read this text as a kind of revision and a reimagining of it, but I did really enjoy it simply on the level of the plot. This novel does have a lot of gore, torture, and death, so the author includes a trigger warning early on, which I felt was more than fair and warranted. What was maddening about this book is the level of corruption and self-interest that motivates powerful governmental officials. The plot gets into motion because Lin Chong, a talented instructor of arms, basically refuses to be sexually assaulted by a high-level bureaucrat named Gao Qiu. Lin Chong is labeled a traitor to the empire under a false claim made by Gao Qiu, and she is originally slated to be executed. A plea by her friend Lu Junyi reduces the sentence, and she will be sent to complete hard labor in a prison camp, but what Lu Junyi doesn’t know is that Gao Qiu is already a step ahead and has planned for the guards who are escorting her to the prison camp to execute Lin Chong before she events get there. Lu Junyi had managed to send Lu Da, a lower-level military fighter to ensure that Lin Chong makes it to the prison camp, and it is Lu Da’s intervention (and the power of something called god’s teeth) that allows Lin Chong to survive that trip. Lin Chong ends up convalescing amongst the ragtag bandits of Liangshan. Back in the Empire, Cai Jiang, another high-level bureaucrat, is focusing on some experiments related to the scholar’s stone, which seems to be a kind of variation of the power that emanates from god’s teeth. Cai Jiang pushes Lu Junyi into this task, and it is Cai Jiang’s quest to harness this power that ends up the biggest source of antagonism for the Liangshan bandits. The Liangshan bandits end up getting into a tussle related to a group of soldiers that Cai Jiang needs to gain more resources, and so Cai Jiang ends up targeting them. The concluding arc sees Cai Jiang essentially use Gao Qiu as a pawn so that he can use the power of god’s teeth to destroy the Liangshan bandits. For their part, the Liangshan bandits put up a great fight, and the final sequence is impressively paced.

 

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A Review of Tiffany Tsao’s The Majesties (Atria, 2020)

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

I seem to have slightly overdone the creative nonfiction thing because I ended up reading four fictional works in a row, and I’m in the middle of a fifth. The first I am reviewing is actually a re-read of a novel: Tiffany Tsao’s The Majesties (Atria, 2020). I read this not long after the book came out, but I realize that I never actually reviewed it, so here I am. I can’t believe how much I forgot, especially the last chapter with the major, Shyamalanesque reveal (no, she doesn’t see dead people, but there’s something like that, and I will spoil it all). Let’s let the marketing description propel us further: “Gwendolyn and Estella have always been as close as sisters can be. Growing up in a wealthy, eminent, and sometimes deceitful family, they’ve relied on each other for support and confidence. But now Gwendolyn is lying in a coma, the sole survivor of Estella’s poisoning of their whole clan. As Gwendolyn struggles to regain consciousness, she desperately retraces her memories, trying to uncover the moment that led to this shocking act. Was it their aunt’s mysterious death at sea? Estella’s unhappy marriage to a dangerously brutish man? Or were the shifting loyalties and unspoken resentments at the heart of their opulent world too much to bear? Can Gwendolyn, at last, confront the carefully buried mysteries in their family’s past and the truth about who she and her sister really are?”

 

This description does not provide much information about the ethnic and transnational elements of this text. Most of the story concerns the rich Sulinado family who are Chinese Indonesians. Estella and Gwendolyn seem to be close sisters, though Estella ends up marrying a man that distances her from the family at large. The marriage is still supported by the Sulinados because Estella’s husband is none other than the son of another rich family, but that family’s wealth craters. For her part, Gwendolyn ends up managing one side of the family business, which involves animated jewelry. If that phrase doesn’t make sense to you, that’s okay. Animated jewelry is exactly what it sounds like. Imagine that the necklace you’re wearing can briefly take flight and then return around your neck. That’s exactly what Gwendolyn’s business designs. To make these unique creations, Gwendolyn actually has to cultivate a kind of fungus that is known to make insects turn into zombies, as their mobile functions and actions are taken over. The whole point is that the fungus can be used to move things and thus make jewelry in new ways. Not surprisingly, the venture is a success and Gwendolyn’s business thrives. Estella is way more ambivalent about her family’s affluence and searches for an aunt who may or may not be alive. Taking Gwendolyn with her, Estella finds out where this aunt is hiding, and they discover the very complicated and tragic story that led her to break complete ties with the Sulinados. Suffice is to say that wealth brings a lot of privilege, including the possibility that the family can orchestrate the apocalyptic ending of any relationship that it does not approve of (in this respect, it does remind me of something from C. Pam Zhang’s Land of Milk and Honey). Now, to that ending (and another spoiler warning)! So, the novel is written en medias res and sort of anachronically. The last chapter gets us to the point essentially of where we started the novel, with the entire Sulinado family, sans Gwendolyn and Estella, dying What we discover is that Gwendolyn and Estella are actually*drum roll please*the same person! Yes, so we have one of those split identity stories that I’ve seen a number of times (see An Na’s The Place Between Breaths and Emiko Jean’s We’ll Never Be Apart for variations on this plot). I wasn’t entirely sold on it, but hey that’s just me! Unfortunately, when I looked up some of the links to this book, a lot of the reviews mentioned Crazy Rich Asians. This novel is definitely not that one, and I think anyone who comes into it thinking that it would be the same has not read any of the actual marketing materials. Tsao has written transnational, Asian American class satire, one that drives home the ethical quandaries that derive out of affluence.

 

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