Backlist books: The Golden Chersonese by Isabella Bird

Backlist books is a column by Lucy Day Werts that focuses on enduring, important works from or about Asia. This post is about The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither, as it was originally titled, which details the author’s travels through China and Southeast Asia from December 1878 to February 1879, and was published in 1883. The book consists of Bird’s letters to her sister, “unaltered, except by various omissions and some corrections as to matters of fact”. She says they lack “literary dress” because she wishes to convey her “first impressions in their original vividness”.

Readers will be favourably impressed by Bird’s appetite for the unfamiliar and tolerance for heat, mud and pests, whether she is drinking from a fresh coconut fetched by a tame monkey, slipping down from the back of an uncooperative elephant or discovering leeches feasting on her bloodied ankles.

See below to find out what you need to know to decide whether you should read The Golden Chersonese, or what you should know about it even if you never do!

A brilliant grappling with history through interlinked stories: Asako Serizawa's sterling debut 'The Inheritors'

Bio: 

ASAKO SERIZAWA was born in Japan and grew up in Singapore, Jakarta, and Tokyo. A graduate of Tufts University, Brown University, and Emerson College, she has received two O. Henry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. A former fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, INHERITORS is her first book. 

Synopsis:

Spanning more than a century, and revolving around the Pacific side of World War II, Inheritors paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of five generations of a Japanese family grappling with the legacies of loss, imperialism, and war. Written in myriad styles and set across Asia and the United States, each of the characters’ stories adds to the others to illuminate the complex ways in which we experience, interpret, and pass on our tangled history. A retired doctor is forced to confront the moral consequences of his wartime actions. His brother’s wife answers a call for first-person testimonies, gradually revealing the shattering realities of life in Occupied Japan. A half century later, her estranged granddaughter, raised in America, retraces her roots across the Pacific, chasing the secrets behind her father’s absence. Decades later, two siblings confront the consequences of their great-grandparents’ war as the world, mutated by new technology, is threatened by a violence more pervasive than the one that scorched the earth a century earlier. Serizawa’s characters walk the line between the devastating realities of war and the banal needs of everyday life as they struggle to reconcile their experiences with the changing world. A breathtaking meditation on the relationship among history, memory, and storytelling, Inheritors is a triumph of imagination and stands in the company of works by Lisa Ko, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Min Jin Lee. 

Of Suitcases and Superheroes: Poems between Singapore and the Philippines

As nations grow closer, so do their literary communities. In this month’s poetry column, we look at the cultural, economic, and literary ties between Singapore and the Philippines, and hear from two poets, Eric Tinsay Valles (whom we last interviewed in 2016!) and Rolinda Onates Espanola, about what it means to write between these two cities.

A translated novel: a team effort

 Nicky Harman reads Zhang Ling’s latest historical novel, A Single Swallow (Amazon Crossing, 2020.)

One of the best-written novels I’ve ever translated is Zhang Ling’s Gold Mountain Blues, about a family from Guangdong, China, torn apart when the men emigrate to work in Canada and their women wait long, long years to join them. So I was all agog to read Ling’s latest novel, A Single Swallow, translated by Shelly Bryant. I found it gripping. Better still, I got to interview all the main players, author, translator and editor.

The story: Three men – two American and one Chinese – reminisce about life in the rural village they were all stationed in during WW2. …and about Ah Yan, (‘Swallow’ in Chinese) who means different things to each of the men, although they each have strong and complicated feelings for her. This novel is set during a horrific time in China, but the human spirit triumphs.

3 Japanese Mystery Novel Recommendations

November is the perfect time for noir aka Noirvember, and that means it’s the perfect time for mystery novels. In Japan, the mystery genre is called suiri shōsetsu (推理小説) literally ‘deductive reasoning fiction,’ and has a long history in the Land of the Rising Sun. Here are just a few recommendations by Japanese authors to read during Noirvember.

 

A new short fiction collection from multi-awarded Filipino American writer and poet Eileen R. Tabios

PAGPAG The Dictator's Aftermath in the Diaspora (Paloma Press 2020)

My first encounter with the work of Eileen R. Tabios was in the middle of 1999. I was in the middle of sorting submissions and curating intentionally diverse work for a flash fiction anthology I had proposed to Anvil Publishing in Manila, that eventually came out in 2003, and was called Fast Food Fiction: Short Short Stories To Go. Tabios’ story in this book was a deft piece, just 469 words (I asked for flash of no more than 500 words, and many writers went far beyond that), focusing on a man who puzzles, genuinely it seems, over the aftermath of passion that had evidently gone too far, with the use of a black leather crop. Adding further interest, the title chosen for the story was, “excerpts from After She Left The Hotel Room” and its text was divided into four petite sections headed, “W, X, Y” and “Z”. 

Not only did I love the dark little story, I admired such clever little conceits suggesting to the reader that submerged beneath this sharp tip is an iceberg of more mysterious life, indeed, the entire alphabet’s worth of it. Noting the (many) books she has authored subsequently, I found none called After She Left The Hotel Room. However, further reading led me to an intriguing discovery. On her blog, Tabios has shared the blurbs for her first novel, Dovelion A Fairy Tale For Our Times, forthcoming this March 2021 out of the arts publisher, AC Books. The blurb from France-based Filipino Reine Arcache Melvin, author of The Betrayed (Anvil Publishing 2019), ends like this, “Tabios uses her pen like Elena uses her whip, provoking tenderness through intense sensation as well as illumination through sensuality and a passionate, hungry mind.” 

Reading this, I stopped short, delighted. Could this “whip” be the same black leather crop owned by the same “she” who “Left the Hotel Room” and is Dovelion's Elena this "she"? 

Tsundoku #15 - November 2020

 November and whether you're just heading into lockdown or just escaping it you need more books. So here's November's selection and don't forget, Christmas is just round the corner and bookshops everywhere could do with a little help this year....first up some new fiction...