Isham Cook
I know that the phrase “truly unique” is considered redundant and bad style, but it took an extraordinary imagination to come up with the concept of this book, not merely to write it. It's exactly what it says it is - a book about the history of Beijing told from the standpoint of its trees, stones and water - with the sort of unassuming, unflashy title guaranteed to put off even readers interested in all things China. You could be a poet laureate and hard-pressed to engage most readers' interest, in our narcissistic electronic era of orgiastic mutual surveillance, in nature (though Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) won me over to the possibilities of such writing), particularly when that's the only thing you're writing about - nature and nature alone (not as a metaphor for something else), if with a bit of history thrown in to contextualize that nature and man's involvement in shaping it.
Virginia Stibbs Anami is the American turned-Japanese-citizen wife a Japanese ambassador, who over a 20-year period from 1983-2003 investigated (what seems like) hundreds of ancient spots in and around Beijing and put it all together like some huge three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle and folded it into a perfectly conceived book. She writes with a beautiful economy, not a word too many or too few on the immediate topic at hand, whether a temple with an ancient tree over 1,000 years old, an equally old or older stone stele with a fascinating story behind its inscriptions, the remains of a long-forgotten waterway or channel. She goes over the territory again and again, revisiting the same spots over decades to see whether they've changed (they typically did and usually for the worse), managing to force or finagle her way into places normally forbidden to foreigners or to Chinese as well. She makes numerous friends in the process, as an inevitable old man or woman pops into view at each ancient site, as if on cue, with an elaborate oral history to tell about it. Not all readers may find all of the stories or episodes equally engaging, but they add up to form an impression of great depth, more than the sum of its parts, a beautiful book. Anami is also an excellent photographer, and credit must be given as well to China Intercontinental Press for the surprisingly professional and tasteful job in terms of the design, layout, and high-resolution photographs (not one of Chinese publishers' strong points, at least back in 2004 when the book was published). The book also has a beautiful cover (shown on Amazon but not Goodreads).
A few mystifying perplexities. None of the hundreds of photos accompanying her narratives have captions. Sometimes it's obvious which picture she's talking about, but frequently not; sometimes she provides a general or fairly specific location, e.g. the name of a town or district, but often not. I suspect this vagueness - in strange contrast to the meticulousness of her research and the attention she lavishes on specific trees, stones, etc. - is deliberate. By not explicitly connecting each site to its picture, she keeps her discoveries shrouded in mystery; by making it difficult for the interested reader to visit the same places, her research remains unprecedented. It's as if Anami is inviting the reader to make the same or similar discoveries but with the proviso that the expedition must not be made easy, that only with great time and effort can one be rewarded with the pleasures of this peculiar sort of layman's archeology.
Novels that hinge on a conceit - an ingenious idea or starting point - are the hardest kind to pull off, and the most memorable when successful. But even with flaws, as is the case with Dwight Okita's The Prospect of My Arrival, they still amount to a greater achievement, in my mind, than exquisitely written conventional “realistic” or “character-driven” novels. The conceit is hard to pull off because it is typically founded on implausibility and requires a suspension of disbelief beyond what the reader may be willing to buy. Kafka's story “The Metamorphosis” (the man who wakes up one morning to find himself unaccountably changed into an insect) is probably the most famous example, which succeeds as a whole because it succeeds on a number of different levels - as fascinating moment-by-moment struggle with the challenges of insect physicality, as complex allegory of fraught family psychology, as stylistic triumph in the inimitable texture of Kafka's dreamworld, etc. Set in a Chicago simultaneously of the present and the future, Okita posits a scientific breakthrough whereby an embryo is temporarily given human form in an artificial body, and, through a software download, a fully functioning consciousness outfitted with rudimentary social knowledge, in order to determine after short stays with different people whether the experience is positive enough for the embryo to want to go through with its birth. The action takes place over the several weeks from when Prospect, our android-like embryo protagonist, first steps into the world until he must announce his choice on national TV. Okita's big challenge with this human tabula rasa, apart from handling the farfetched central conceit, is how to create interest and complexity in a character that has none. At the outset, at least, the protagonist's simple and naive thoughts as he wends his way through a complicated adult world, and the spare prose and short sentences in which his thoughts are rendered, lend the impression less of a novel than a children's book, and a very good one at that, though due to some sexual developments, we'd better call it a children's book for adults, or an adult's book for children. But as the story gathers steam - I felt it gets off to a slow and somewhat ponderous start - and the pieces of Okita's design start falling into place, it grows increasingly compelling (better that than the all-too-many books that start off strongly only to eventually peter out!). The book succeeds on several levels. If Prospect never fully develops complexity of character (at least before his time is up), the cast of characters surrounding him are eccentric and fraught enough to comprise a convincing microcosm of the human comedy, in particular the corporate greed that would hatch such profiteering biological tinkering to begin with. The narrative is also an allegory of American society from the outsider's point of view, the gay experience for one, as Prospect's closest friendship involves the verging-on-sex romance with a sympathetic young man named Lito. In addition, there are a number of other intriguing conceits scattered throughout the book, any one of which could be mined for a novel in its own right. One of Prospect's various hosts, for instance, a wealthy business type named Trevor, himself had chosen to undergo another bizarre scientific procedure enabling one to permanently excise an unwanted character trait - in Trevor's case, his “sense of wonder,” and the results are deliciously comical; Trevor turns out to caricature, guess what, your typical cynical neocon technocrat. Perhaps Okita can hone his considerable talents in a future novel - and another captivating parable of the human condition - where the characters, each minus an essential human character trait, grope about a Beckett or Philip K. Dick or uniquely Okita-like landscape as they manage the struggle of merely getting along.
There is nothing more difficult than finding out what goes on in the mind of a prostitute, even when one is genuinely curious and not afflicted by sanctimony. She won't give men an honest answer, since they are potential customers, and will claim she earns less than she actually does to gain sympathy. She won't give women an honest answer, since they are potential competitors or worse - moralists. Academics and sociologists have no better luck trying to interview the prostitute, even when offering to pay for her time; she will then be happy to cooperate and will tell them exactly what (she thinks) they want to hear, exaggerating her circumstances and stories for shock effect. It's a classic problem of circling around the truth without ever getting any closer to it. Perhaps the female ethnographer could penetrate more deeply into this world by becoming a prostitute herself for a spell, but this is usually precluded by ethics protocols in academia (not to mention that in most countries sex work is an illegal activity). Another potential source of valuable information is the men who regularly sleep with prostitutes, though the information and stories they have to offer are secondhand and bound to be deeply subjective and self-serving as well.
Yeeshan Yang does not shy away from these obstacles. She confronts them directly in the first chapter, laying out her informal methodology - a compromise between the social worker interviewer and partial participant observer. We never really find out why she herself is interested in the topic of prostitution, but it's enough to know that she is, as we all are. However, her honesty inevitably forces her to confront the ultimate question as a female researcher, why she doesn't engage in sex work herself to gain the priviest perspective, and her response is poignant in its blunt candor: “Even if I did try to prostitute myself, I would likely end up digging my own tiny, burning pit of shame.” To compensate for her acknowledged “narrow vision,” she works very hard, hanging out on the streets and hostess clubs over months and years trying to meet and befriend as many sex workers of all types as she can. The insights that emerge from this approach are numerous and startling. If you talk to enough people in the same occupation, you will begin to see patterns and truths, some that I have never quite understood myself, despite my own extensive acquaintance with numerous sex workers in mainland China, e.g.: “Prostitutes have a stronger desire for love than do average women.”
The result is a flawed yet profound book (which is why I'm still giving it 5 stars). Yang lacks the academic's sense of structure, and there is a loose sense of organization to her chapter sequencing that may strike some as haphazard. She also lacks the novelist's conciseness of expression and dramatic propulsion. The stories pile up of initially colorful characters who descend one after another into the same sad degeneracy of their materialistic fetishes, abusive relationships with pimps or boyfriends, drug addiction, jail and the repeating of these cycles over and over until they either waste away in prison or disappear into obscurity. She seeks but fails to find the counterpoint to these tragic tales - the happy hooker. We are left wondering if this mythical creature could possibly exist anywhere or may very well exist but was missed because the author was hanging out with all the wrong people. One suspects that if another intrepid author set about writing the same sort of book, a whole different cast of characters might emerge that would still bring us no closer to the truth of the prostitute. On the other hand, I don't think I've read a non-fiction account of prostitution that goes as far as Yang's does in its sheer persistence in the attempt.
Joumana Haddad is a writer, poet and intellectual who celebrates the liberation of the body in her native Arabic and as well in remarkably fluent English, French, German, Italian, Armenian and Spanish. In terms of her linguistic capacity's reach, sexual freedom has never had a more effective and articulate spokeswoman (or should we say spokesman?) than this amazing polyglot. “I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman” is a quick-read in the tradition of political pamphlets such as the “Communist Manifesto.” If this work doesn't hold its own on the polemical bookshelf, I'm sure Haddad has yet more incisive works up their sleeve. The timing couldn't be better, with the unfolding Arab Spring. Her writing is also of universal relevance. I live in China, and I plan to lend this book out to my English-speaking female friends (a Chinese translation is certainly called for), who need merely substitute the word “China” for “Arab” to see how much it speaks to them, in a country where the virginity cult is alive and well amidst futuristic skyscrapers, luxury consumerism, and even strikingly revealing clothing on the streets in the summertime.
Reacting to this as a white male growing up in the US and Canada in the 1970s and tail-end of the 60s (I can already hear women clamoring in condemnation of my having the nerve to arrogate the right to speak about or on behalf of women, let alone Arab women, though this only underscores the freedom of speech Western women have secured), I have to say, I don't know, I have just never been able to fathom this virginity thing. It simply never occurred to much less bothered me or anyone else around me when we became sexually active in our teens and thereafter whether girls were virgins or not. I assumed no men considered it important anymore until years later I chanced upon those incomprehensible news stories about Middle-Eastern women being punished or killed for real or imagined sexual transgressions, including pre or extra-marital sex. So I have a different angle on this. No, I am not threatened by sexual women, more power to you, the world needs a lot more of you. On the other hand, as Haddad points out, Western Judeo-Christian culture is not as sexually free as we assume. As an atheist I have no Christian guilt or hang-ups, but in no society anywhere is sexual discourse and action very free. Sexual abuse and harassment remain a big problem in all societies. We can't talk frankly about sex except in terms of its dangers and the proper (moralistic) channeling of it. Americans are notoriously uptight about their bodies; American women can't breastfeed in public without being arrested or accused of lewd activity. And so on. Perhaps everyone should give Haddad's paean to the sexualized body a read.
I do have a sticking point. Haddad cites the Marquis de Sade as one of her prime inspirations and literary influences, as he was mine. You have to actually sit down and read Sade to understand this. His novel “Justine” (Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings) blew up in my face like a bomb as a freshman in college, and I had to set aside all my homework to finish it. Sade is not simply about sadomasochism; he is about the working out of mental freedom. He pushed obscenity to the point where it took on philosophical depth and profundity, to the point he inhabited this realm exclusively and mined it for its knowledge. The obscene becomes perfectly logical in any bourgeois or patriarchal society disturbed by it, which relegates it to the private and the unspeakable. The whole Sadeian point is that privacy and domesticity themselves are obscene. Sadeian freedom is also a metaphor for the freedom of language. I wish I could hone my own language to a sharp enough point that with a single sentence I could slay the virginity dragon, convince so many young Chinese females to cast off the brainwashing and fear that presses them into the virginity cult, which is nothing other than the modern version of the brutal foot-binding their foremothers experienced.
Haddad's assured style slackens in the rather generic incantatory formulations that conclude the book, when what I'd like to see more of is a celebration of the obscene, starting with her own sexuality. It's nice to know, as she tells us, that she masturbates, prefers red bras (but wait - you didn't get that idea from Chinese women did you, who are traditionally indoctrinated into believing they must wear red bras and underwear when their Chinese horoscope year comes up?) and shaves her armpits (damn! nothing is more erotic than a woman's hairy underarms), but that's about it. There is scant concrete information about the men (and women?) in her life, her sexual experiences. To paraphrase Nabakov, I want the divine SEXUAL detail. What is her actual erotic life like in the particular and close-up? Could she really be worried about her privacy after reading Sade? Here she might take a page from the scandalous Chinese blogger Mu Zimei, who has written up her scores (or is it hundreds?) of sexual experiences with men in loving detail and posted them online (and has been translated into French (“Journal sexuel d'une jeune Chinoise sur le net”) and German (Mein intimes Tagebuch). I haven't yet had the pleasure of reading her and hope it's an invigorating and not a tawdry read, but along with Joumana she's another woman I'd like to get to know.
Joumana Haddad is a writer, poet and intellectual who celebrates the liberation of the body in her native Arabic and as well in remarkably fluent English, French, German, Italian, Armenian and Spanish. In terms of her linguistic capacity's reach, sexual freedom has never had a more effective and articulate spokeswoman (or should we say spokesman?) than this amazing polyglot. “I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman” is a quick-read in the tradition of political pamphlets such as the “Communist Manifesto.” If this work doesn't hold its own on the polemical bookshelf, I'm sure Haddad has yet more incisive works up their sleeve. The timing couldn't be better, with the unfolding Arab Spring. Her writing is also of universal relevance. I live in China, and I plan to lend this book out to my English-speaking female friends (a Chinese translation is certainly called for), who need merely substitute the word “China” for “Arab” to see how much it speaks to them, in a country where the virginity cult is alive and well amidst futuristic skyscrapers, luxury consumerism, and even strikingly revealing clothing on the streets in the summertime.
Reacting to this as a white male growing up in the US and Canada in the 1970s and tail-end of the 60s (I can already hear women clamoring in condemnation of my having the nerve to arrogate the right to speak about or on behalf of women, let alone Arab women, though this only underscores the freedom of speech Western women have secured), I have to say, I don't know, I have just never been able to fathom this virginity thing. It simply never occurred to much less bothered me or anyone else around me when we became sexually active in our teens and thereafter whether girls were virgins or not. I assumed no men considered it important anymore until years later I chanced upon those incomprehensible news stories about Middle-Eastern women being punished or killed for real or imagined sexual transgressions, including pre or extra-marital sex. So I have a different angle on this. No, I am not threatened by sexual women, more power to you, the world needs a lot more of you. On the other hand, as Haddad points out, Western Judeo-Christian culture is not as sexually free as we assume. As an atheist I have no Christian guilt or hang-ups, but in no society anywhere is sexual discourse and action very free. Sexual abuse and harassment remain a big problem in all societies. We can't talk frankly about sex except in terms of its dangers and the proper (moralistic) channeling of it. Americans are notoriously uptight about their bodies; American women can't breastfeed in public without being arrested or accused of lewd activity. And so on. Perhaps everyone should give Haddad's paean to the sexualized body a read.
I do have a sticking point. Haddad cites the Marquis de Sade as one of her prime inspirations and literary influences, as he was mine. You have to actually sit down and read Sade to understand this. His novel “Justine” (Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings) blew up in my face like a bomb as a freshman in college, and I had to set aside all my homework to finish it. Sade is not simply about sadomasochism; he is about the working out of mental freedom. He pushed obscenity to the point where it took on philosophical depth and profundity, to the point he inhabited this realm exclusively and mined it for its knowledge. The obscene becomes perfectly logical in any bourgeois or patriarchal society disturbed by it, which relegates it to the private and the unspeakable. The whole Sadeian point is that privacy and domesticity themselves are obscene. Sadeian freedom is also a metaphor for the freedom of language. I wish I could hone my own language to a sharp enough point that with a single sentence I could slay the virginity dragon, convince so many young Chinese females to cast off the brainwashing and fear that presses them into the virginity cult, which is nothing other than the modern version of the brutal foot-binding their foremothers experienced.
Haddad's assured style slackens in the rather generic incantatory formulations that conclude the book, when what I'd like to see more of is a celebration of the obscene, starting with her own sexuality. It's nice to know, as she tells us, that she masturbates, prefers red bras (but wait - you didn't get that idea from Chinese women did you, who are traditionally indoctrinated into believing they must wear red bras and underwear when their Chinese horoscope year comes up?) and shaves her armpits (damn! nothing is more erotic than a woman's hairy underarms), but that's about it. There is scant concrete information about the men (and women?) in her life, her sexual experiences. To paraphrase Nabakov, I want the divine SEXUAL detail. What is her actual erotic life like in the particular and close-up? Could she really be worried about her privacy after reading Sade? Here she might take a page from the scandalous Chinese blogger Mu Zimei, who has written up her scores (or is it hundreds?) of sexual experiences with men in loving detail and posted them online (and has been translated into French (“Journal sexuel d'une jeune Chinoise sur le net”) and German (Mein intimes Tagebuch). I haven't yet had the pleasure of reading her and hope it's an invigorating and not a tawdry read, but along with Joumana she's another woman I'd like to get to know.
Robert MacLean is a Canadian-born novelist, playwright and filmmaker, now an Irish citizen and expat living in Greece. These facts alone struck me and made me curious as to what he had to say, how a filmmaker writes fiction, or a novelist makes films, and a cosmopolitan one at that, and whether the resulting products bear further investigation. I have not seen any of his films, although the trailer to his “Emma Blue” certainly looks intriguing, and I would watch it if it were available.
“Will You Please Fuck Off?” is the latest in a series of e-book novels featuring the jaded but likable protagonist Toby Tucker, who has a fondness for a parvenu lifestyle but can't seem to help getting tripped up in all manner of farcical situations. In fact the book is a collection of two novellas and three short stories, the most substantial being the novella of the book's title that takes up the last third. “Will You Please” is the meatiest of the stories. It's not an easy narrative to summarize, since so much of the telling involves affect and attitude, verbal wars and nervous dialogues, that I'm not always sure what is actually happening, apart from involving the pursuit of a wealthy Englishwoman named Marcie, the tribulations of trying to get a foot in her wealthy circle (which includes the Queen of England), and the humiliations of getting booted out of it, all the while fending off a homosexual with a crush on Toby and contending with a Chinese female prostitute disguised as a psychotherapist who practices S/M. As I have yet to read the other books in the series I will forbear on a more comprehensive evaluation, but this latest publication is self-contained enough to stand on its own and seems to offer a nice taste of his oeuvre. It is good enough at least to motivate me to start at the beginning with the first Toby Tucker novel Foreign Matter: In Trouble with My Fantasies (The Toby Series).
The other novella, “Certainly Something,” is a hilarious account of an eccentric group of loopy tourists in Athens who barely sidestep one disaster after another, despite the efforts of their tour guide, the same Toby Tucker. The titles of the shorter stories, “The Fat Girls Contest,” “Attack of the Giant Feminists,” and “The Great Detective” hint at their content, and I will not spoil the fun except to say they serve up excellent satire. MacLean's is a wry, sophisticated voice and may not be for everyone. He writes as if the Political Correctness regime of the last few decades never or shouldn't have happened, though he tends to avoid vulgarity and offense, even as the Marquis de Sade is obviously a major influence. If “Giant Feminists” might irk some readers for its hostile spoofing of a stereotype, his other male characters display an earnest, almost celebratory sexual penchant for obese women.
A smarmy democratic or egalitarian world view you will not find here, as there is an almost shameless (if ironic) embrace of the aristocracy and its tastes, mirrored in a richly polished prose, which refuses to say anything profound but plays on the surface like light on jewelry but is nonetheless highly seductive and laser-sharp: “The pouch under his chin palpated as he waited, if you could speak of his having a chin. A mouth was what he had, a wide mouth that seemed to end at his shoulders and gave him a calculating look. A let's-wait-and-see look.” I suppose this is how the filmic or cinematographic quality of MacLean's writing manifests itself, in the sensuous movement from sentence to sentence as from visual image to image. This is the type of writing that can be read aloud - and re-read - with pleasure. The danger of an excessive preoccupation with the particular and the sensual, with texture, is that the reader can easily lose track of the whole, and I have to confess having only elusive impressions upon finishing these stories, a lingering effect of mere style rather than truth or depth of meaning or complex human predicaments. Yet it's an assured and consistently wrought style, and that's the most important thing for me - a distinctive voice. The acid test of literary writing is that it not only invites re-reading, the second reading I predict will be a superior experience, where the trees recede and the forest comes into view.
We have a paradox of a book here, a compelling 300-page account of China with virtually nothing to tell us about life in China or the Chinese. How does Carl Crow, the famous Shanghai newspaper editor and American China hand of 25 years, pull it off? We are given the bigger historical picture, a sweeping discussion of the centuries of maritime trade up through the opium wars, the occupation by the Western powers and the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, before the narrative circles inward to give us a close-up of life in foreign-occupied Shanghai over the early decades of the 20th century - right up to the day the author is forced out of the country upon the Japanese invasion in 1937. It is a fine historical introduction written by the sure hand and balanced objectivity of the experienced journalist.
But we soon realize that despite being less than a hundred years ago we are encountering an era as strange as that of Marco Polo's, or to be more exact, the US antebellum south, or the world of “gay cocktail parties” that a China-bound F. Scott Fitzgerald might have penned (when “gay” had a different meaning from what it does today), and Crow is not entirely able to extricate himself from the biases of his age - this was a time when it was still fashionable to be racist. It is a China peopled entirely by expat bachelors and families, bored bridge-playing wives, their China “boy” servants, amahs, and anonymous kitchen hands. Not a single fleshed-out Chinese person is described in the entire book, nor a single one even named, apart from the brief, touching mention in the final pages of one “Ching,” a servant of Crow's hastily delivering some food as he and his family flee the Japanese attack. The remaining cast of hazy Chinese occupy the narrative background as ciphers, as so many shadowy and inscrutable Fu Manchus.
We do note changes in prejudices and attitudes. Before the First World War, when Shanghai was divided into the French, British and American concessions and effectively walled off from the rest of the city, the parks there had signs forbidding entrance to “Dogs and Chinese” (I presume the signs were in Chinese as well as English). It would never have occurred to anyone on either side to extend social intercourse beyond business relations or transactional necessities, not surprising considering the “very large class [of foreigners in China] who looked with considerable disdain and disgust on all Chinese people.” After the war and start of the Republic, things began to relax and there was more mutual curiosity and gesturing across the cultural divide. But the Chinese remained as unknowable as ever. Here Crow succeeds with his knack for the telling anecdote, even when it doesn't reflect too well on the author himself. He relates without irony how he was once picked up by a taxi driver whom he failed to recognize he had previously employed as his personal chef of four years! Or the bizarre methods of communication designed to keep personal relations impersonal, such as between this American bachelor and his servant: “Seated at his breakfast table he would strike the table bell as a signal to put the eggs in boiling water and, watch in hand, would strike it again when it was time to take them out.”
Even in its heyday of excitement and notoriety, gay Shanghai, the Paris of the East, seemingly had very little to do with China. The foreign community was too busy with their ponies, polo and racing matches, golf courses and drinking and yachting clubs to be much bothered with the Chinese. Crow spends considerable space detailing the controversies preoccupying the exclusive foreigner clubs - the restrictions on proper dress and the knotting of ties, the election of new members to a club, the etiquette of buying rounds of drinks. And yet it is these particulars that are oddly fascinating in their very remoteness to our own experience in present-day China, with the easy interaction of foreigners and locals meeting online or at Starbucks or in the workplace, and the burgeoning cohabitation and intermarriage between foreigners and Chinese.
Walls do remain in entrenched attitudes among many Chinese and foreigners even today: the parents who forbid their daughter to marry a foreigner (and vice versa), locals who are easily whipped up into anti-foreigner nationalist hysteria, foreign expats who after many years in the country can't count to ten in Chinese or remember how to say their Chinese-assigned name. One quote from the book could be lifted out and inserted into any current Western account of China, as we all know expats like this: “The foreigner was rarely tempted to try Chinese food and many of them lived a lifetime in China without every tasting roast duck or sweet-and-sour pork.”
Imagine a ferocious polemic by a Japanese feminist systematically and relentlessly anatomizing and blasting to smithereens the entrenched culture of male chauvinism and sexism in one of the world's most developed countries, Japan, decked out as a novel, with arguments stretched onto witty and entertaining dialogue among a cast of four angry but endearing professional women, the four “pillars” as they call themselves, mutually supporting each other in their host of grievances and frustrations over the men they have to contend with in their lives and work - Sachi, a fashion designer, Emi, a banker, Tomoko, a lawyer, and Suzue, an ad firm executive.
It would not seem like an easy literary feat to pull off, considering other apparent shortcomings the reader begins to notice in the novel. The author, Rei Kimura, a lawyer living in Singapore, wrote the work originally in English and, as is apparent from the numerous asides in the narrative introducing various facets of modern Japanese culture that a Japanese audience could take for granted, for an English audience (I am not aware of the existence of a Japanese version or whether one is in the works). The fast-paced plot never flags, alternating among the four characters' perspectives as they recount their tense and complicated scenarios with scheming male bosses and traditional-minded parents trying to hold them back from a life of independence and career accomplishments.
Yet there is little concrete sense of atmosphere or textured description in the telling. Kimura's is a generic Japan that could equally be the Japan of the present or of 20 or 30 years ago - or indeed almost any country where women have achieved enough parity to compete with men professionally but not enough to escape conformist sexist strictures. She is clearly deeply acquainted with her country but one also suspects she has been out of the country for a while. Sexism continues to be a major obstacle to women's political and economic advancement in Japan, but there have been changes. I lived there for several years two decades ago and even then a number of women I knew seemed to have lived their lives with greater autonomy and choice than the impression one gets of the narrow constraints available to women in this novel (here I should recall that the remarkable Japanese female novelist Amy Yamada was already dealing with similar themes and outraging and entrancing audiences back in the 1980s in depicting her female protagonists happily getting involved with Black American servicemen in such novels as Bedtime Eyes).
Perhaps the key problem is that Kimura's female protagonists are largely generic creations in their own right, with few of the idiosyncrasies that make literary characters memorable. Sachi and Tomoko never quite come to life. Emi interestingly throws away her banking job to go to Africa to work with the impoverished; when she returns we learn nothing about her Africa experience or how it has changed her, apart from the scandalizing of her family by adopting an African child. Suzue is the most vivid character and the bulk of the novel is devoted to her. She's the product of an interracial encounter with a Black American serviceman in Japan who leaves the country before he learns of her mother's pregnancy, all hushed up by her family. With her mixed racial features, she has the hardest time fitting into her society and is hardened and honed by this process into an exceptional and powerful woman. She is also the most sexually liberated, sleeping with and casually dumping numerous men, until getting more seriously involved with a handsome though faceless Englishman, Robert (a relationship that is left hanging by the end). Their sex life is likewise as generic as his name. After all the sketchily described nights of “wild” and “abandoned” sex, I still have no idea what it would actually be like to experience sex with Suzue, what she tastes like, how making love with her would be different from that of any woman. If this is a novel, ultimately, about the sexual liberation of Japanese women, let's have a more accented and nuanced description of erotic emancipation in action!
What rescues and redeems the novel is that is very, very funny. Suzue's entrapment of a vindictive former boss who hired her early in her career as an escort prostitute is highly entertaining, as is the general pleasure these women take in trampling over and just generally disappointing anyone and everyone blocking their path and getting in the way of their respective journeys toward personal liberation. I found it highly readable and would not hesitate to award it five stars except for one significant problem: my own career as an English teacher of picky standards. Kimura's command of the language is not the problem; her English is perfectly fluent, idiomatic and engaging. However, the lack of a thorough going-over by a competent editor has left it riddled with numerous grammatical, spelling and punctuation typos. I particularly have a problem with the utter absence of hyphens joining modifying adjectives (it's possible these were accidentally deleted in the conversion to the e-version, but maybe not). The novel thus deserves a serious editing to polish and tighten up the language and increase its readability to help ensure the wider readership it deserves.
Nothing is more annoying than frivolous 1-star reviews casually tossing off mean-spirited and dishonest comments like “poorly written” (as appears on Amazon). Benson Tong's “Unsubmissive Women” is a carefully and tellingly written account of a rare topic, Chinese sex workers in a 19th-century American city. Let's get the facts out on the table to make it clear why it's not an easy topic to write about. The overwhelming majority of these women were teenagers from rural China who were bought or kidnapped from their families or duped into believing they could find high-paying jobs in the “Gold Mountain” of California. Upon arriving, they were forced to work as sex slaves in brutally managed brothels, typically receiving little to no salary, and then cast out on the street as soon as they passed their prime or became ill or incapacitated from STDs. They left almost no written accounts of their experiences such as letters or diaries because they were illiterate and unable to write. The only records we have that enable us to piece together and reconstruct this underground society are municipal in nature - police, legal and demographic records, and newspaper accounts generally of a sensationalized and derogatory nature, reflecting the shocking racism of white Americans towards Asians at the time, coupled with patronizing Victorian attitudes toward degenerate women preying on upright Christian families. Incidentally, the tradition of duping women into prostitution with lucrative job offers in another country is alive and well in our times, e.g. East European women enslaved in West European brothels, their passport confiscated by their pimps and terrorized into obedience through beatings. The Chinese too remain experts in this trade, as in the recent news about Chinese women lured by traffickers to Angola with the promise of legitimate job offers, only to find themselves in Chinese brothels there.
The author focuses on the decades between 1850-80, from the onset of the gold rush to the start of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, when virtually all Chinese were forbidden from entering the US and those within the US were encouraged to leave and were attacked, beaten, or arrested. It's almost unbelievable that such vicious racial animosity could erupt and become law in a country that had just outlawed slavery. The only people who attempted to help Chinese prostitutes during these decades were a smattering of Catholic charities for “fallen” women. But with no surviving accounts of these women themselves, apart from refracted details of legal testimony by injured Chinese prostitutes who had the gumption to fight back or go to court and testify with little or no English capability against their violent johns or pimps - hence the “unsubmissive women” of the title - we have very little to go on but our imagination. Benson Tong's dispassionate and empathetic treatment compensates for the dry academic nature of the material he's working with. It's to his credit that he embellishes nothing but allows the records to speak for themselves and encourage the reader to imagine the rest.
I've never been as enthralled with this as many others are, though I can't deny its overall excellence as a novel.
I read this about 4 decades ago and have completely forgotten what I read; I'll update this at some point.
All of Borges' story collections are essential reading for anyone interested in the literary imagination and exceptional writing; I began with Labyrinths.
Baudrillard lays out his famous parody theory - Disneyland, brothels, and all other forms of entertainment are just parodies of the real thing, American life itself.
This slim volume was hard for me to understand when first introduced to Foucault in Lauren Berlant's literary crit class at U Chicago back in ‘83, but the thesis was momentous: sex, far from being repressed, is ever discursively exploited as a form of power.
It's been a long time since I read this but I can still hear Steinbeck's pitch-perfect dialogue among the impoverished proletariat in the early 20th-century American West.
Classic Chomskey text, but go back earlier to The Political Economy of Human Rights for an even more forceful and urgent tome by the same authors.
The great novel was foisted upon me by the first literary woman I fell in love with back when I was 19, and so I was compelled to read it (I still have the copy she gave me); it was a bit too sophisticated for me at the time and I will have to return to it.
Read this decades ago when the English translation first came out and was enchanted by this early exemplar of magical realism, as everyone was. Yet I find that I haven't been drawn back to writing of this type, which can seem a bit contrived in retrospect.
I was less taken with this bestseller than many, perhaps something was lost in the translation (or I may need to reread).
This was one of the first novels I read as a teenager, sparked by Colin Wilson's The Outsider. A classic text on alienation, more compelling than Sartre's Nausea.
Plato is required reading for anyone interested in Western literature. Despite the totalitarian horrors of Plato's imagined utopia, he is surprisingly readable and entertaining, as it's all disguised in the affable voice of Socrates.
This was the book that got me on to Zizek. His witty and engaging style towers over his turgid philosopher rivals. Watch Zizek dressed in ratty T-shirts and jeans and flip-flops debate rivals in suits and ties on YouTube to fully appreciate his ridiculous genius.
This founding New Age text (the other is Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull), before the New Age Movement even began, is actually pretty good. Some memorable poetry here.
The book needs to hype; it remains one of the two founding dystopian novels - the other being Orwell's 1984. The most incredible scene is the riot among the Epsilon clones.