“Perhaps there is a line in everyone’s life that, once crossed, imparts a certain truth that one has not been able to see before, transforming solitude from a choice into the only possible line of existence.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 21, 2014)

“Perhaps there is a line in everyone’s life that, once crossed, imparts a certain truth that one has not been able to see before, transforming solitude from a choice into the only possible line of existence.” For four friends, that line was crossed during their late teenage years, when one of them was poisoned, perhaps deliberately, perhaps accidentally, lingering in a physical limbo state until she finally dies years later.  The young man, Boyang, remains in China; the two young women, Ruyu and Moran, move to the United States. Each ends up living in what the author describes as a “life-long quarantine against love and life.”

Kinder than Solitude is not primarily a mystery of a poisoned woman nor is it an “immigrant experience” book, although it is being hailed as both. Rather, it’s a deep and insightful exploration about the human condition – how one’s past can affect one’s future, how innocence can be easily lost, and how challenging it is to get in touch with – let alone salvage – one’s better self.

“To have an identity – to be known – required one to possess an ego, yet so much more, too: a collection of people, a traceable track lining one place to another – all these had to be added to that ego or one to have any kind of identity,” Yiyun Li writes.

In the case of Moran, who married and divorced an older man she still cares for, what she called her life “…was only a way of not living, and by doing that, she had taken, here and there, parts of other people’s lives and turned them into nothing along with her own.” Riyu, the most enigmatic and detached of the characters, is an empty vessel, unable to connect or to experience much pleasure or pain, who strives to receive an “exemption from participating in life.” And Boyang, a successful entrepreneur with a cynical sense of the world, has discovered that “love measured by effort was the only love within his capacity.”

This is a deeply philosophical book, one that delves into its characters, with an ambling narrative that shifts from the shared Chinese past to the present –China, San Francisco, the Midwest. It is not for everyone – certainly not for readers who are anticipating an action-packed, page-turning suspense novel. But for those who seek insights into the human condition and love strong character-based novels, Kinder Than Solitude offers rich rewards.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 16 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (February 25, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Yiyun Li
EXTRAS:	Q&A and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Pen/O’Henry Prize Stories 2010 edited by Laura Furman

Bibliography:

• A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories (2005)
• The Vagrants (2009)
• Gold Boy, Emerald Girl: Stories (2010)
• Kinder Than Solitude (February 2014)

“Copper wire is bought, sold, chopped, and sorted until it reaches a new place–and a stage–where somebody can afford to make it into something new. The chain is commonplace: refrigerators, plastic bottles, and old textbooks follow the same path, the only difference being the processes used to turn the used-up goods into raw materials, and the locations of the people and companies who want to buy the results.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (DEC 13, 2014)

It was probably just a coincidence that we put up our holiday lights today. The setting up of the twinkling bulbs is probably as much of an annual tradition as its other unfortunate side-effect: practically every year, we discover some strands that just don’t work. Now imagine the same scene being played out in every American household. That’s a lot of unwanted strands of Christmas lights. As it happens bales upon bales of these get exported to China, where workers set upon them stripping the wires free of insulation to get at the copper that is one of the most valuable raw commodities a booming China needs. The demand for raw goods — copper, steel, aluminum — in rapidly growing countries like China is fueling a global demand for all kinds of scrap be it metal, plastic and even rags (white rags can be turned into paper).

Adam Minter’s lively account of these peregrinations of our discards around the world make for fascinating reading. He visits scrapyards in China, India and countries in Africa, emphasizing the point that goods will flow to places where it can be shipped most cheaply and for the most net profit. So it is that India imports scrap not from the United States, but from Dubai. Why? Because India exports a lot of foodstuffs to Dubai and when those containers return, they come loaded with scrap from the middle-eastern country. It’s the same method that works for China and the United States. Minter adroitly points out the symbiotic relationship between these two large economies. American consumption of cheap Chinese goods means huge shipping containers departing for American shores from China. Scrap left over after all that consumption is then shipped to China in these same (now) empty containers. For those who worry about American scrap being shipped “all the way to China,” — Minter points out that these containers would be moving back and forth anyway. It’s just that now on the return journey, they get filled with scrap culled from multiple American outlets.

Each chapter is devoted to a particular kind of scrap — copper metal/wires, steel, plastics, even e-waste. Along the way we get to meet all kinds of interesting players and learn fun facts (trivia lovers, rejoice!). For example, did you know that in the scrap industry, Talk is shorthand for “aluminium copper radiators,” Lake for “Brass arms and rifle shells, clean fired,” and Taboo for “mixed low copper aluminum clippings and solids?” Even if it could have used some more detail into the hows of the various kinds of recycling, Junkyard Planet is still a great read. Excellent pictures complement an already powerful story.

Junkyard Planet is especially good at painting a complex picture of recycling, the morality behind doing the right thing (with respect to recycling) and our consumption. It should be noted that this is not a preachy book. The son of scrap metal dealers, Minter has a fondness for the industry that any regular outsider might not, and as a journalist, he lends interesting insights while painting a picture that’s more grey than black and white. For example, when he visits Wen’an County in China where a plastics recycling industry was in full force, and where environmental standards and workers’ safety issues were blatantly disregarded, Minter is quick to add that for many workers here, these jobs were actually a step up. While this might indeed be the case, Minter is sometimes too ready to condone some of these more atrocious acts of violations. His “who are we to judge especially because we are such eager consumers” attitude might be a worthy journalistic outlook but it washes over the crimes too easily sometimes.

The true problems can really be solved only when living standards rise, he points out, and when more pressing issues that face every developing country–food safety, proper nutrition, and clean water–are solved first. No one can really argue with that thesis. But this list fails to overlook the fact that workers’ safety and environmental standards on the one hand and the attainment of these other “must-dos” on the other, need not be mutually exclusive. In fact, they’re quite interdependent.

One of the most sobering lessons that Junkyard Planet delivers with precision (and with excellent bedside manners) is that recycling is not really a get-out-of-jail-free card for consumption. “Boosting recycling rates is far less important than reducing the overall volume of waste generated–recyclable or otherwise,” Minter writes. Amen to that!

A couple of days ago, we received a card in the mail that advertised the services of a company that would take away our metal scrap for free. Old and rusted appliances were their friends, they said. Thanks to Junkyard Planet, we now know what fate these appliances actually meet. Adam Minter’s journalistic account is an intriguing and eye-opening account of one of the many gears that keeps the world economy going.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury Press; 1 edition (November 12, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	The Personal Blog of Adam Minter
EXTRAS:	NPR interview with Adam Minter
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More on China: Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang

Bibliography:

• Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade (November 2013)

“…what mattered very much to Richard was what an imaginary dwarf would encounter once he hefted a virtual pick and began to delve into the side of a mountain. In a conventional video game, the answer was literally nothing. The mountain was just a surface, thinner than paper Mache, with no interior. But in Pluto’s world, the first bite of the shovel would reveal underlying soil, and the composition of that soil would reflect its provenance in the seasonal growth and decay of vegetation and the saecular erosion of whatever was uphill of it, and once the dwarf dug through the soil he would find bedrock, and the bedrock would be of a particular mineral composition. It would be sedimentary or igneous or metamorphic, and if the dwarf were lucky it might contain usable quantities of gold or silver or iron ore.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (SEP 30, 2011)

Neal Stephenson’s ReaMde, a play on words for the ReadMe file that accompanies many computer programs, is above all a wild adventure/detective story set in the present day. As one would expect from this author, current technology features prominently. The cast of characters is international, offering windows into such diverse types as Russian gangsters, Chinese hackers, American entrepreneurs, Idaho survivalists and second amendment fanatics among many others. A video game, T’Rain, is central to the tale. Most of the characters are addicted to the game; much of the detection is done by playing the game or by mining the data kept by the game. ReaMde as a story is something like a prolonged session of T’Rain. T’Rain is a play on words for terrain.

Reamde is a computer virus that hijacks data by encrypting it so it is unreadable. Victims get a computer message including a file named ReaMde, that they mistakenly read as ReadMe. ReadMe files are text files with important how-to information and are commonly bundled with downloaded computer programs. The victim opens the file, but instead of getting a text message with useful information, they activate the virus. The victim is told that they must pay a ransom in virtual currency within the T’Rain game in order to receive the encryption key that will free their data. The virtual currency is worth a fairly inconsequential sum in real money, something like $75. The action starts as a consequence to Reamde hijacking credit card data that has been sold to Russian gangsters. The gangsters kidnap the seller and his girlfriend, who just happens to be the niece of the founder of T’Rain, the computer game in which the ransom must be paid.

T’Rain is a game played on the Internet with thousands, maybe millions of players at any given time. The game play consists of the interaction of this massive cast of characters in an incredibly detailed world. ReaMde is played out in much the same way with a very large cast of fascinating characters. They include:

Richard Forthrat, billionaire founder of Corporation 9592, the parent company of the computer game, T’Rain, a game distinguished by the incredible richness of its simulation of an entire world, its underlying physics and 4.5 billion year geophysical history;
Zula, his niece, an Eritrean refugee with a specialty doing computer simulations of the geophysics of volcanoes, a skill she is employed to use to enhance the virtual richness of T’Rain; Ivanov, the Russian gangster who purchased the credit card data from Zula’s boyfriend and kidnaps the two to start off the adventure; CIA and M16 operatives, gun nuts, fundamentalists of all stripes from Christian survivalists to Islamic jihadists.

The story flows remarkably smoothly for all its complexity, and is immensely readable. All the ends tie together and the action never flags, just like an addictive video game. This is a great entertainment for anyone in tune with modern computer technology, gaming or just plain interested in a good adventure story. One wonders how an entire world’s physics could be simulated in such a game. The story itself is like the computer game that is itself a part of the story, raising the idea of recursive games within games. How could a game with such virtual complexity be supported? This is the only part of the tale that is science fiction in that even the much simpler complexity of atmospheric or ocean physics is beyond the reach of current technology.

ReaMde is like a video game, and recalls the serialized adventure stories from the pulp era with its intensely interconnected series of adventures and adventurers. The characters are all fascinating. They each embody an adventurer or geek type possessing exceptional luck, physical and/or technical prowess. Each spin of the adventure dial is within the realm of possibility, but there is no sense that this is realism. What we have is great escapist literature with a gaming twist. In short, just about perfect for the geek-gamer audience.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 508 readers
PUBLISHER:	William Morrow (September 20, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Neal Stephenson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Our reviews of: Anathem Quicksilver The Confusion Snow Crash

Bibliography:

• The Big U (1984)
• Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller (1988)
• Snow Crash (1992)
• The Diamond Age (1995)
• Cryptonomicon (1999)
• Anathem (2008)
• Reamde (2011)

The Baroque Cycle

• Quicksilver (2003)
• The Confusion (2004)
• The System of the World (2004)

Non-Fiction

• In the Beginning… Was the Command Line (1999)
• Some Remarks (August 2012)

Written as Stephen Bury (with his uncle J. Fredrick George):

• Interface (1995)
• The Cobweb (1997)
• Artists’ Multiples, 1935-2000 (2002)

“It might come in a drop of rain,” Xue Xin continued, ignoring the question, “a note from a faraway flute, the fall of a leaf. Of course, you have to be ready for it or it will pass unnoticed. But if you are ready, and your eyes are open, you will see it and suddenly understand everything. Then you will know who you are and what you must do.”

“Satori.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAR 07, 2011)

Satori, by Don Winslow, is a prequel to the best-selling thriller, Shibumi, by Trevanian. Trevanian introduced the world to Nicholai Hel, master of hodo korusu, “the naked kill.”  Hel speaks six languages, is a master of the game “Go,” and has a special proximity sense – the ability to detect when any person or thing is nearby. As Satori opens in 1951, the Korean war is in full swing and the Americans have had Nicholai in solitary confinement for three years for the honor killing of his beloved stepfather, General Kishikawa. General Kishikawa, sentenced to a public execution, loved and raised Nicholai, teaching him “Go.” Rather than let him die that way, Nicholai killed him himself.

While in jail, Nicholai was brutally tortured, physically and pharmaceutically by a CIA agent named Diamond. Out of the blue, a CIA agent who is a colleague of Diamond’s approaches Nicholai with an offer. The United States will give him $100,000 and a passport if he will kill Yuri Veroshenin, the Soviet Commissioner to Red China. The CIA’s reason for wanting Veroshenin killed is to put a wedge between Beijing and China. Nicholai takes the offer but he has other agendas – he wants to get even with Diamond and he hates Veroshenin who once forced his mother into a lurid affair so that she could survive.

A plan is put in place for Nicholai to kill Veroshenin with the CIA’s assistance. It is more like a suicide mission for Nicholai than anything else. His odds of surviving are about 1%. Before the mission begins, however, Nicholai must get a new face. He has been so savagely beaten while in jail that his face is a mess. He is sent to a plastic surgeon and then to France where he is to learn the language nuances and mannerisms of the identity he is to take, that of Michel Guibert, an arms dealer. In France, he is taught appropriate southern French by a beautiful woman named Solange, an ex-prostitute, who also teaches him about his adopted background and life in Montpellier where he is supposedly from. They fall in love but Nicholai must leave to begin his mission. He promises to return to her.

Before the mission begins there is an attempt on Nicholai’s life in France by two men from China but Nicholai manages to kill both of them. Nicholai heads off to China and the action revs up. There are arms deals, crosses, double crosses, and no one knows who to believe about what. Nicholai does manage to kill Veroshenin but he is shot in the leg and the CIA’s extraction team fails to show up. Instead, Nicholai’s life is saved at the very last minute by a mysterious group of monks who take him somewhere secret to heal and where he searches for satori, “true understanding and harmony with the world.”

Nicholai is trying to figure out who is after him and why. It seems like everyone has a reason. The cold war is blasting, Vietnam is a hotbed of strife and the different communist nations are not at peace with one another. Nicholai heads to Hanoi where he sets up his own arms deal and is followed by the CIA.

There is a wonderful cast of characters in this book, many kinky, quirky and mean. Winslow knows his geography and history and it comes through clearly, though at times a little too detailed for my preference. Readers know that Nicholai can survive all that this book throws at him because he is alive and well when Shibumi starts. He relies on his skill with Go to navigate the subtle feints and misdirections he is faced with and figure out each of his moves. Go is a game said to be much more complicated than chess; Nicholai is very good at it.

This is a thriller to end thrillers. At times I got lost trying to figure out who was after who and why, but mostly it was fascinating and fun.  Winslow’s writing kept me turning pages through the night and he is at the top of his game with this novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grand Central Publishing (March 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Don Winslow
EXTRAS:	Note from Don Winslow and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Savages The Winter of Frankie Machine The Dawn Patrol California Fire and Life Our review of a couple Trevanian novels: Incident at Twenty-Mile

Bibliography:

• The Death and Life Of Bobby Z (1997)
• California Fire and Life (1999)
• The Power Of The Dog (2005)
• The Winter of Frankie of Machine (September 2007)
• The Dawn Patrol (June 2008)
• Savages (July 2010)
• Satori (March 2011)

Neil Carey Series:

• Cool Breeze on the Underground (1991)
• The Trail to Buddha’s Mirror (1992)
• Way Down On The High Lonely (1993)
• A Long Walk Up The Water Slide (1994)
• While Drowning In The Desert (1996)
• Isle Of Joy (1996)

Movies from Books:

• Bobby Z (2006)
• Savages

“This is the kind of story the Jade Emperor himself enjoys hearing from me, one where the focus, indeed the whole point of the tale, is the grand heroic choice, the cinematic action. He is always telling me to hurry up, to cut out the needless detail, to do some editing and present him with the stripped-down version. But life is not like that. The fight to ensure the survival of love is more likely to find its toughest battles amid small snarls about changing nappies or midnight feedings or plain old boredom; it is more likely to focus on little betrayals or hurtful slips of the tongue, to feature the day-to-day heroism of pretending not to be aware of a thousand little annoying habits. In short, love is hard work, and the fairytale ending of our story is only the beginning of the hard work of keeping love alive.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (DEC 7, 2010)

If this book doesn’t attain the high readership it deserves, there is no justice. It’s quite simply one of the most lavishly imagined, masterfully researched, exquisitely written contemporary novels I’ve read. And if that sounds as if I’m gushing…well, it’s probably because I am.

Under Fishbone Clouds is written by debut author Sam Meekings, who grew up near the south coast of England and currently resides in China. It is absolutely remarkable that the author is under 30; the book is full of gravitas and maturity that is normally the result of decades of living and writing. Interwoven seamlessly within this mesmerizing narrative is Chinese folklore and myths – absorbingly told – in addition to insights into Chinese distant and recent past history.

This novel is narrated by the Kitchen God, a common household deity who is challenged by the more powerful Jade Emperor to fathom the inner workings of the human heart. He chooses to follow a couple who, like him and his own mythical wife, were caught in the whirlwind of history: Jinyi and his wife Yuying. The tale begins in 1942 when the two fall in love, in spite of their different backgrounds and their arranged marriage, and continues to their doddering old age as the new millennium takes hold.

At the onset, Yuying follows her husband across war-torn China to her husband’s rustic and impoverished home. Bad times ensue, and when they eventually make their way back to the city, the Cultural Revolution has begun; everything now belongs to the state and all social strata are forced to undergo hard labor in the factories and the fields.

Although the Mao Cultural Revolution years have been well documented, Under Fishbone Clouds takes you up close and personal to these dehumanizing times; it is a rare reader who will not wince at the no-holds-barred look at a country whose rigid ideology trumps personal relationships and freedoms. Business owners, entrepreneurs, artists, teachers, intellectuals – all are labeled “bourgeois” and re-educated in the harshest possible ways. In a particularly harrowing scene, a man has a heart attack and is ordered to “crawl” to comfort and stop being a slacker. The depths to which Jinyi and Yuying are forced to descend to – separately, without each other’s comfort – is heartbreaking.

Yuying reflects, “Life isn’t meant for perfect things. I knew it when we were told to put making steel above common sense; I knew it when we were told to starve patriotically because the noble peasants had been huddling around homemade furnaces instead of growing food in the fields; I knew it when the whole country began to rise up to cut down the past. I felt in the pit of my stomach all the time; I just never knew what it was until now.”

Yet despite the intensity of the Cultural Revolution years, Under Fishbone Clouds is not a book about tragedy; at its heart (and a big heart it is), it’s a family saga about the universal and enduring power of love. There is sheer magic and lyricism in the love that Jinyi and Yuying share as they navigate answers that are often impenetrable.

And, Meekings suggests, by love we are transfigured. Jinyi realizes toward the end of his life: “Love also changes shape. It is no longer slim, lithe, nervous and sweaty palmed. It was no longer sleepless, heavy, a stone weighing deep within the chest. It was now warm, slow, soft, a tarry old blanket huddled under in the dark. It was the last embers of a promise made decades before, still glowing red though the flames had petered down.”

Using Jinyi as a catalyst, the Kitchen God comes to the realization that people don’t just carry on with their lives because they must; the secret of life is love, atonement, and retribution. He puzzles out the human heart as he follows this couple through all kinds of trials: deep anguish, death of children, famine and forced labor, class warfare, drastic social and culture changes, isolation and homelessness, the loss of dignity and health.

Under Fishbone Clouds is one of those rare books that I would confidently recommend to anybody: those with an interest in the history of the East, those who are enthralled with mythology and folklore, those who hold out for the best of prose, and those who are simply seeking an old-fashioned story where love prevails. I predict an amazing future for this very talented author.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Thomas Dunne Books; First Edition edition (December 7, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Living Scotsman interview with Sam Meekings
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More novels based on Mao Cultural Revolution: A Dictionary of Maqiao by Han Shaogong Becoming Madam Mao by Anchee Min And a current novel that it can be compared to: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

Bibliography:

• Under Fishbone Clouds (2009; December 2010 in US)

“Yumi’s mother grew lazier by the day. The physical toll of childbirth had undeniably affected her vitality. But it was one thing to hand Little Eight over to Yumi, and yet another to turn the whole household over to her. What does a woman live for anyway? Isn’t it to run a household? If she shuns even the authority to do that, what besides a rotten egg with a watery yolk is she? But there were no complaints from Yumi, who was content with the way things were. When a girl learns to care for a baby and take charge of a household, she can wake up that first morning after her wedding day fully prepared to be a competent wife and a good daughter-in-law, someone who need not be in constant fear of what her mother-in-law thinks.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (AUG 9, 2010)

Three Sisters by Bi Feiyu is a tragicomic novel, a tongue-in-cheek parody, about three sisters in the Wang family living in Wang Family Village in rural China: “Many rural villages are populated mainly by families with the same surname.”   The novel opens in 1971 and ends in 1982. It is structured like three novellas though it is described by the publisher as a novel. The book’s strength, and also its weakness, is that it is primarily comprised of character studies without a lot of plot. This can make it less accessible to some readers. Throughout the novel, the author utilizes Chinese proverbs, aphorisms and adages to make points. It comes out sounding something like a Greek chorus, adding a comic element to what is often heart-rending or calamitous. It is also very culture-specific which makes it harder to access for many readers.

The background is Maoist China following the Cultural Revolution. The position of women is lowly. They have no say in their lives except through subtle avenues where they can make small choices that may have a large impact on their lives and those in their community. This is often achieved by how a salutation is given, who is addressed and who is ignored, and what gossip is spread among them.

The book opens in 1971 with the story of Yumi, the oldest sister in the Wang family. The family is comprised of seven daughters and one son. Yumi’s mother has given up the care of her son to Yumi who takes her brother around the village with pride as though she were his mother. In essence, she is the head of her family. Her father is a philanderer and a drunk who has the job of commune-secretary. He falls from grace when an affair he is having with the wife of an active duty soldier comes to light. This impacts Yumi’s marriage plans. She had been engaged to an aviator from a neighboring town but he pulls out of the engagement because of Yumi’s father’s disgrace. Yumi is a strong woman who has plans – she wants to be associated with power. She manages to become the second wife to a powerful man in another village. Though her heart is broken and she is filled with embarrassment and shame, she proceeds with her life, giving the appearance of “one of those intrepid women in propaganda posters, a woman who could charm any man and still look death in the face without flinching.”

The second part of the book is about the third daughter,Yuxio. Yuxio is a flirt and is described as cunning and two-faced, like a fox or a snake. She and Yumi have never gotten along and she has never respected Yumi’s authority. After her father’s downfall, she goes to attend a movie and during the course of the film she is abducted and raped. Yumi does her best to help her maintain face in the village but is soon gone off with her husband to a new town. On top of the shame associated with the rape, Yuxio gets into a fight with one of her younger sisters that is observed by many in the village. The outcome of this fight is that Yuxio becomes a village outcast.

Yuxio leaves her village and travels to Yumi’s home where she seductively entrenches herself into the good graces of Yumi’s stepdaughter and husband. The next thing Yumi knows, Yuxio is living with her family. There is already a wedge between Yumi and her stepdaughter and this is widened by Yuxio. Though Yuxio actually despises the girl, she fawns and acts obsequiously towards her. She is so underhandedly awful and provocative in her behaviors that she is described as “a dog that can’t stop eating shit.” She tries to install herself into the good graces of various town folk but over and over she sabotages herself by her indiscreet and false pretenses. It doesn’t take long for others to catch on to her back stabbing personality. Yumi becomes pregnant and Yuxio loses her power at home. By the end of this section Yuxio is in much worse shape than when she started. She has ended up fooling nobody, not even herself.

The third chapter in the novel is about Yuyang, seventh sister, and takes place in 1982. Yuyang has won a scholarship to a teaching college and gets involved in the intrigue of the school, working on underground intelligence. This consists primarily of keeping an eye on her fellow students and teachers to see who is fraternizing with whom and reporting these events to her superior. She has read a lot of Agatha Christie and feels up to the job.

The novel ends without pulling together the lives of the three sisters. There is no follow-up to the other two stories and no real connecting of them. That is why I consider this book to be comprised of novellas rather than considering it a novel. I think this book might appeal to readers who are familiar with Chinese literature and culture. It is not likely to have widespread appeal because of stylistic issues. I found it informative and interesting, at times laugh-out-loud funny but I am sure that there is a lot here that went past me. (Translated by Howard Goldbatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 10 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (August 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bi Feiyu
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More from Chinese writers: The Dictionary of Maqiao Han Shaogong

Bibliography:

• The Moon Opera (2007; 2009 in US)
• Three Sisters (2008; August 2010 in US)

“Irene couldn’t bring their father back, but if she could gather them all for this tour, together they might recover a missing link. Not the notion that Kay was chasing of their laojia, their ancestral home – but a new understanding of an old truth, old as civilization itself. A truth about death and life, about generations, about permanence. Then, and perhaps only then, could she and her daughters come back home. Jia – family, house, home. In Chinese it was all one word.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (JUL 20, 2010)

In 2000 Fei toured China, her family’s ancestral homeland, with her mother, two sisters, grandmother and aunt. From that trip came the inspiration and the framework for this painterly, character-driven first novel. In acknowledging this Fei is quick to assert, “it is not about them; it does not depict their histories or their personalities.”

I expect her relatives will be quick to agree as Fei’s well-drawn characters – strong women all – are not only flawed, but cranky, querulous and generally dissatisfied with their lot. Except the grandmother, turning 80, a former nationalist revolutionary whose life of struggle, glory and tragedy has settled into a peaceful old age in California near her son.

“In her own home Lin Yulan was strong, self-sufficient, active, autonomous. On this tour she had to just keep up. And she could have, if not for her failing body. Aching joints, blistering feet, diarrhea – such were the afflictions finally dragging her down.

Meanwhile, her daughters and granddaughters complained, heaved loud sighs, cursed at mosquitoes – one bane she’d outlasted. Mosquitoes, like men, prefer younger, softer flesh – eating tofu, as the saying goes.”
Their trip to their China is the mother’s idea (Lin Yulan’s daughter). Alone at New Year’s, five months widowed, her three daughters scattered, Irene’s loneliness makes her desperate. She last saw her daughters together at their father’s funeral. He had died the day he left her, having fallen asleep at the wheel of his car. Irene believes the girls blame her. That day, she slammed the door on him, saying “Good riddance,“ words she has regretted ever since.

Irene devoted her life – giving up a brilliant career in genetics – to her daughters. Each was valedictorian of her class; each went on to a prestigious university. Nora, the eldest, excels in a man’s world on Wall Street. Kay, a social activist, is in China, trying to get in touch with her roots and save Chinese prostitutes. Sophie, the youngest, will be off to college at summer’s end and can’t wait.

Gorgeous and brilliant, each girl is unhappy. Fei’s writing is precise and exquisite, but she fails to let these girls redeem themselves with a sense of humor or moments of reflection at their immense good fortune.

Nora is engaged, but unable to name a wedding date, consumed by fears of betrayal – which are inevitably fulfilled. Kay keeps three very different men at bay, unable to choose or let them go, and Sophie, less willowy than her sisters, hates her body and indulges in bulimia.

Irene’s sister, Susan, a poet, married late in life. “Susan had said, as if it was a lesson learned, Nobody wants to die alone.”

Lin Yulan left her husband to come to America with her three children. She and her husband were nationalists – heroes during WWII who were forced to flee to Taiwan when the communists took over. He was a philanderer and she has cut him out of her life entirely, although her granddaughters, particularly Kay, who has met him, hope for a reunion. As does the old man, apparently. He plans to come to Hong Kong to meet them after the tour.

The novel’s point of view roves from woman to woman, each with her secrets, her inner fears and doubts, her struggle to keep the proper image of herself in place even for family.

The trip itself is rather appalling: a captive group bussed and rushed from place to place, seeing a lot more of official souvenir shops than Chinese “must-sees.” They are taken advantage of at every opportunity and even Irene and Susan, who speak the language and connect with some of the people, find themselves shrewdly, cynically, manipulated.

Secrets are revealed along the way, but one secret is much greater than all of them and helps put things in perspective. The women reach varying degrees of epiphany, a difficult journey for each. No one gets everything they want, but each finds an unexpected strength in vulnerability and family bonds.

Fei is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of several academic grants and it shows. The characters are beautifully drawn, every sentence is well crafted and the pace is measured. Fei is in control of her art and while some readers may wish she had taken herself just a tad less seriously, most will find this well-shaped story satisfying and its prose a pleasure to savor.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 24 readers
PUBLISHER:	Penguin Press HC, The (April 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Deanna Fei
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More on China: Big Breasts, Wide Hips by Mo Yan Brothers by Yu Hua And a bit lighter: The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan

Bibliography:

• A Thread of Sky (April 2010)

“The family’s changes seemed especially hard on Cao Chunmei. In the beginning, the pressure of loans and investment weighed heavily on Wei Ziqi, but now business had been stable for two years. He took pride in his rising status – there was a new confidence to the way he moved around the village. But in Sancha a woman rarely occupies that role, and for Cao Chunmei, more customers only meant more work. On busy weekends she rarely left the kitchen; most mornings she woke up to a stack of dirty dishes from the previous night’s guests. She gained little pleasure from the new income, and her contact with outsiders was fleeting.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (MAR 4, 2010)

The first section of New Yorker writer Hessler’s engrossing three-part portrait of China’s headlong rush to the future is peppered with questions from the Chinese driving test:

“223. If you come to a road that has been flooded, you should:
Accelerate so the motor doesn’t flood.
Stop, examine the water to make sure it’s shallow, and drive across slowly.
Find a pedestrian and make him cross ahead of you.”

Hessler came to China in 1996 with the Peace Corp and stayed for 10 years. He got his license in 2001, as roads and drivers were proliferating, and planned a cross-country trip. Development was intense in coastal regions but the north and west were still remote, many roads unlabeled.

“352. If another motorist stops you to ask directions, you should:
Not tell him.
Reply patiently and accurately.

tell him the wrong way.”

He decided to follow the Great Wall, which is actually a series of fortifications built of various materials in various states of ruin. It was harvest time and the farmers laid their produce on the edges of the road for sorting and drying and threw grain into the middle for threshing.

“Initially I found it hard to drive over food. On the first day of my journey, I screeched to a halt before every pile, rolling down the window. ‘Is it OK for me to go through?’ The farmers shouted back impatiently ‘Go, go, go!’ And so I went – millet, sorghum, and wheat cracking beneath me. By the second day I no longer asked; by the third day I learned to accelerate at the sight of grain.”

He meets amateur historians and government tree planters, picks up hitchhiking young people coming from factory towns to visit family, and camps in the desert to avoid officialdom (Hessler’s favorite Chinese motto is “it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission.”)

His prose meanders organically, exploring the China of the past and the present, from the Ming dynasty and the route of Genghis Khan to the roller-coaster excitement of road-testing the newest Chinese car.

He also proves his credentials here as a fearless adventurer. Few things can be more dangerous than driving in China, where driving lessons are laugh-out-loud bizarre, seat belts and turn signals are considered superfluous and traffic fatalities are twice as high as in the US, with one fifth the number of vehicles.

In Book II Hessler homes in on the traditional village, renting a house in mountainous, rural Sancha about two hours drive from Beijing (maps orient the reader at the start of each section – would there were pictures too!) as a writing retreat. There is only one child in the village (the young have migrated to the cities) and Hessler becomes friendly with Wei Jia’s parents, Wei Ziqi and Cao Chunmei.

Handicapped by his lack of education (typical in the country) and his peasant looks, Wei Ziqi tried factory work, but returned to his village to farm. Smart and ambitious, he had tried and failed at leech farming and was now turning to tourism, which was following the better roads and increased prosperity.

Hessler limns the family’s fortunes as Wei Ziqi builds a restaurant, and takes up the two essentials for doing business – smoking and drinking. As the friendship grows, Hessler drives Wei Jia to boarding school kindergarten and witnesses Cao Chunmei’s growing unhappiness and isolation. China remains a man’s world and there’s no place where that’s more evident than the countryside.

For Wei Ziqi, ambition and increased prosperity opens new doors. He’s invited to join the Communist Party and run for office. He owns wardrobes for both city and country. For Cao Chunmei increased prosperity means more work. For both it means more anxiety. Wei Ziqi gets angry and drinks too much, his wife grows more fatalistic.

Through his connection to the Weis, Hessler explores village gossip and politics, and takes part in the walnut harvest. In a harrowing section (which was a New Yorker article) Hessler encounters the Chinese medical system first-hand when Wei Jia becomes suddenly ill and it’s Hessler, with his car and U.S. connections, who tracks down treatment.

Hessler’s American sensibilities often illuminate the cultural contrasts. When the Weis grow rich enough to have a TV and Wei Jia comes home from school, the formerly tough and wiry boy grows soft in front of the TV eating junk food all day. Hessler frets about this, but to Cao Chunmei there’s no point in having a TV if you don’t watch it and few pleasures greater than watching a child eat.

The final section explores the burgeoning factory towns popping up along new expressways, each with a specialization – buttons, playing cards, umbrellas. “Datang produces one-third of the socks on earth.”

Hessler chooses Lishui for his focus: a town that is about to have an expressway exit, and already has an Economic Development Zone. He gets in on the ground floor, approaching a city-dressed man outside a half-built factory and follows the fortunes of the place from factory design, which takes an hour and a half, to production (bra-strap loops), rocky times, success and reorganization.

Again, individuals provide the narrative impetus. The owners let Hessler hang around for good times and bad. Job interviews are a rough and tumble affair. The best incentives are lots of overtime and no vacations, since there’s really nothing else to do.

Hessler finds another fascinating group to follow when, on the basis of outsize personality and persistence, a teenager gets jobs for her whole resourceful family, who also run a side business providing goods to workers.

There’s tension in the beginning when the expensive machinery doesn’t work, tension when the orders don’t come in like they should, tension when their most crucial worker wants to visit his pregnant wife (code, maybe, for abandoning the sinking factory).

Contrasts and contradictions abound. The group dynamic is so strong one complaint can spark a sea of grumbling, but self-help books urge workers to lie and think solely of themselves. A precious baby’s 50th-day celebration takes place in a cigarette-smoke filled restaurant amid spatters of hot oil.

Upheavals in the countryside – particularly dam-building projects – create a lot of grumbling, but to little effect. “It was particularly depressing because in a way the system worked well. It didn’t necessarily make people happy, and it certainly wasn’t fair, but it was extremely functional.” The government scattered people, resettling villagers in a lot of different towns. “And they created lots of little rules that distracted people from the larger issues.”

Armed with the informed outsider’s ability to see the larger picture, Hessler engages the reader with his own affection and fascination for an ancient culture in overdrive. Endlessly curious, fluent in the language, willing to go anywhere, and talk to anyone, his graceful prose carries us along, into the mountains, the dusty deserts, the mud-walled village huts and concrete factories, but most of all into the lives of the people he meets.

Humorous, affecting and intelligent, Hessler’s latest  should captivate anyone with an inkling of interest in China.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper; 1 edition (February 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AMAZON PAGE:	“Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Factory to Factory
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Peter Hessler
EXTRAS:	Excerpt Harper’s interview with Peter Hessler
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read a review of book by his wife: Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang

Bibliography:

• River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001)
• Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China (2006)
• “Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Factory to Factory (February 2010)

“The [gender] divide implied certain things. Young women enjoyed a more fluid job situation; they could join a factory assembly line and move up to be clerks or salespeople. Young men had a harder time entering a factory, and once in they were often stuck. Women, in the factory or out, came into contact with a wider range of people and quickly adopted the clothes, hairstyles, and accents of the city; men tended to stay locked in their outsider worlds. Women integrated more easily into urban life, and they had more incentive to stay.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (MAR 4, 2010)

American journalist Chang, who kept her Chinese heritage at arm’s length for many years, explores her family’s past and the country’s history as she follows the lives of migrant workers in the industrial city of Dongguan, where 70 percent of the population is female.

Most of the factory girls are uneducated, age 18 to 25, flocking in from rural villages. “Most migrants associated the place they came from with poverty and backwardness, and some were even reluctant to say the name of their village.”

Chang, former Wall Street Journal Beijing Bureau chief, surveys the scene, interviewing many and getting a sense of their naiveté, hopes and ambitions, before homing in on several stories and following two in particular, Chunming and Min. An engaging storyteller, Chang pulls readers into the girls’ dreams, failures and desires, turning this in-depth social study into a riveting page-turner.

“To me every town looked the same. Construction sites and cheap restaurants. Factories, factories, factories, the metal lattices of their gates drawn shut like nets. Min saw the city through different eyes: Every town was the possibility of a more desirable job than the one she had. Her mental map of Dongguan traced all the bus journeys she had made in search of a better life.”

Chang visits The Talent Market, where young people jockey for jobs, seldom staying put for long, though bosses hold back two months of pay and may try to prevent them from leaving. Mobile phones are lifelines. To lose one is to lose all contact with friends, who have no fixed abode, no relatives to anchor them.

“Women worked as clerks and in human resources and sales, and they held most of the jobs on the assembly line; the bosses felt that young women were more diligent and easy to manage.”

Want ads were often very specific:

“SALESPERSON: FEMALE ONLY, GRADE FOUR ENGLISH
RECEPTIONIST: FEMALE ONLY, CAN SPEAK CANTONESE
SECURITY GUARDS: MALE, UNDER 30, 1.7 METERS OR ABOVE, EX-MILITARY, KNOWS FIREFIGHTING, CAN PLAY BASKETBALL A PLUS

As Chang moves from the general to the personal she calls on diaries, e-mails and visits with Chunming and Min, who are more ambitious and single-minded than most, learning first to use their youth and naivety to land a job, and then to scheme and lie and study hard to jump to better jobs, out of the factory and into the office.

Chunming is lured into a brothel and escapes, losing everything but her life, then claws her way back with a stolen ID card, eventually reaching heady heights in sales, only to have the company collapse and land her back on the assembly line. Not that she stays there for long.

Most girls return home to marry after age 25. Min and Chunming, still ambitious, hope to marry, but their attempts at meeting men mostly fizzle. The man is too short, or not ambitious enough, or maybe too violent and dissolute.

Chang visits Min’s family with her and charts the contrasts between village closeness (and lack of privacy), customs and family hierarchy, to the free-for-all life of the factory town. And, too, the family balance of power is changing. Min, sending back money, making home improvements, has more say and more attitude.

Exploring the lives of these girls, Chang makes side trips into her own family history – her landowner grandfather, village life, the family flight to Taiwan, migration to America. The contrast is as sobering as the pace of life in modern China, where nothing stays the same for long and history is to be honored and then smashed up for re-development.

Chang’s well-organized book is an illuminating portrait of a culture in economic and social upheaval and her empathetic portrayal of individuals is moving and engrossing.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 34 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau; Reprint edition (August 4, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AMAZON PAGE:	Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Leslie T. Chang
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read review of her husband’s book: Country Driving by Peter Hessler

Bibliography:

• Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (October 2008)

“Watching roads can be a way to look at history, to measure human progress and limitation.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (FEB 15, 2010)

Ted Conover won a National Book Critics Circle award for his last work of non-fiction, Newjack, a narrative about the Sing Sing prison. One can imagine that after such an endeavor he went after freedom—the essence of it personified by a wide stretch of empty road.

In his new book, The Routes of Man, Conover takes a look at different roads all across the world and takes us along for the ride.

The book is fascinating not just because of the diversity of places represented but because each chapter so beautifully depicts a road’s role in one of the many of the problems facing humanity today: war, disease, pollution, rampant development.

Our first expedition traces the path of mahogany from New York to its origin in the rainforests of Peru. Most of it is set in Peru where Conover takes a precarious ride along small roads through the Andes mountains to a logging camp deep in the forest. Conover shows how the country’s residents stand to both lose and gain from a more permanent, wider road that would cut through the forest and facilitate more commerce between Peru and its economic powerhouse neighbor, Brazil.

Conover is a master of narrative and this and other chapters in the book are full of wonderful descriptions and interesting asides. His talent is on full display here. Never to miss the smallest of details, he finds humor and irony in the most unexpected of places. For example, the monument to biodiversity in the state of Madre de Dios in Peru, he notes, is made of concrete.

Conover’s travels also take him into remote regions in other parts of the world. He visits Zanskar, a part of Ladakh—the eastern, Buddhist part of the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir. Zanskaris are cut off from the rest of the world from October to May when it snows but once the ice settles, young Zanskaris travel the frozen road called the chaddar and leave for higher studies at a set time every year. It’s a rite of passage described beautifully by Conover. Here too the Indian government has promised a more permanent road in to Zanskar—it’s of vital geopolitical importance to India, Zanskar being very close to the border with Pakistan.

The best chapter in The Routes of Man details the place of roads in war—a never-ending one. Conover visits the Israel-Palestine border and sees the situation through the eyes of both Israeli soldiers who have to staff checkpoints daily and the Palestinians who have to suffer these indignities every day. One hears news about the region practically every day but this impartial account of the war especially in its daily humdrum, is spectacular. The Routes of Man is worth reading just for this segment alone.

His description of a walk through an Israeli checkpoint is moving: “As I fell into step with the dozens of people heading past the guard tower, past concrete road dividers spray-painted with graffiti (“Israel Out”), past the cameras mounted atop poles, toward a low structure ahead with a corrugated roof, a red light next to the single lane for cars, and cyclone fencing and loops of razor wire on the sides, Fares’s reluctance to leave the town made more sense: this was starting to feel like prison.”

The road as vector for disease is described by Conover’s visit to Kenya—he travels the truck routes infamous as facilitating the rapid spread of AIDS in the country.

Each chapter in the book makes for great reading; Conover’s latest is a fascinating read.

The problem with The Routes of Man is its subtitle: “How Roads are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today.” It’s misleading and worse, promises a grander historical treatment of the subject than what we get. This is not to say that The Routes of Man is a mediocre read—it’s actually a fantastic one. But too often, some chapters feel like extremely good travelogues—and just that. It’s not quite what the subtitle promises. Conover does try in brief asides to inject some more heft into the book by discussing other road-related topics—like the history of Broadway Street in New York and the evolution of speed—but these don’t work. Their objective—to stitch the overall project together—is too transparent.

“One of the great challenges in writing a book about roads is to avoid the inadvertent use of road metaphors,” Conover writes. Yet you wish he would actually make these connections more evident. The last two chapters describe a driving expedition undertaken by nouveau riche in China and an ambulance driving around the roads of one of the starkest cities in the world—Lagos, Nigeria.

It is these two chapters, especially, that feel removed from the larger essence that Conover is trying to communicate. The chapter on China shows how money is turning the country around and how the disposable income many urban Chinese now have is giving them new kinds of opportunities for recreation—including a “self-driving” (as opposed to being driven by a chauffeur) trip. Yes, this chapter too takes place mostly on the road but the overall effect is disjointed—the lines between the new roads and the new China made out less clearly.

This same problem applies to the last chapter in Lagos, Nigeria. Again, it’s a compelling travelogue but exactly how the road is the central feature in the story—it’s hard to tell.

But The Routes of Man should be read for the wonderful narrative Conover injects into all his travels. The diversity of the places chosen makes it even more fun to go along for the ride.

Two yeas ago, our family decided to vacation in a small town at the foothills of the Himalayas—Mussoorie. Our hotel room was so high up in the mountains that it was regularly invaded by clouds that swept in when we left the doors open. On our way back down to the plains, we took a taxi down an extremely narrow, ribbon-like road that in most places didn’t have any barriers separating our tiny car from the steep vertical drops. I was convinced we were soon going to meet our end. As our crazy cabbie took one more sharp turn around one more precarious hairpin bend we suddenly came across a huge sign: “Speed Thrills but Kills.” The irony of the situation was not lost on any of us.

Looking back, I think the sign that Conover saw in Lagos, Nigeria, would have driven home the point better: Drive Soft—Life Get No Duplicate.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 3 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (February 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AMAZON PAGE:	The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ted Connover
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More “road” books: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do by Tom Vanderbilt China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power by Rob Gifford

Bibliography:

• Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes (1984)
• Coyote: : A Journey Across Borders With America’s Illegal Migrants (1987)
• Whiteout: Lost in Aspen (1991)
• Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (2000)
• The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today (February 2010)