Book Recommendations

[Anonymous]

Just started WHEN ASIA WAS THE WORLD/ Gordon. Interesting, in the first chapter it explains how and when the 150 foot tall statues of Buddah that the Taliban recent destroyed came to be. It's a tragedy that something so many hundreds of years old could be destroyed so suddenly.

[Anonymous]

I just finished Yu Hua's novel Brothers. At 641 pages in the English translation, it takes a while, but I loved it and would recommend it highly to anyone. Whether or not it can be incorporated into an English class is another question, however, as the second half of the book takes some turns that would likely cause concern among colleagues and parents. The satire, which reminds me of the classic English author Jonathan Swift, and especially of his Gulliver's Travels, involves such things as hymen reconstruction, breast enlargement surgery for a man, and a beauty contest exclusively for virgins. Yu Hua clearly understands the commodification of sexuality as a key aspect of capitalism in China, and he milks it for all it is worth in this overwhelming carnival of a book.
The first half would make an excellent introduction to the great leap forward and the cultural revolution. The brothers of the title, randy capitalist Baldy Li and sentimental good man Song Gang, are actually step brothers, as their parents get married after they have both been born to other unions. The contrast between the greedy, ruthless Baldy Li and the sweet-tempered, long-suffering Song Gang is the book's baseline. From there, Yu Hua builds up a vivid comic universe out of the colorful citizens of Liu town, the small village that, through Baldy Li's entrepreneurship, becomes a bustling city by the end of the novel.
The other main characters of the first book (the novel is divided into two very different parts) are their parents, both of whom are depicted as heroic victims of the cultural revolution. The murder of Song Fanping, the father of Song Gang, is one of the greatest descriptions of political violence I have ever read, and had me thinking that Yu Hua was a kind of Chinese Tolstoy.
The main characters of the second half are Lin Hong, the beauty of Liu town who becomes Song Gang's wife, and a cast of misfits including a con man and several villagers who abandon their traditional occupations to participate in Baldy Li's capitalist revolution.
Although the book is very long, it is never difficult or boring. Yu Hua has a real knack for keeping the interest at a good pitch, and his pacing is impeccable.
What will give many readers pause is how dark and unredemptive the book's satire becomes in the final 200 pages or so. His vision of contemporary China, like the Hollywood of Los Angeles author Bruce Wagner, is at once an incredibly distorted fantasy and a directly reported reality. Boss Li, as Baldy Li becomes known, has an insatiable appetite for sex that leads him to do some pretty awful things, and the consequences of his mania are painful for all of the main characters.
Despite the brutal ending, there's a playfulness and humor to the second half that does redeem this cynical portrait to some extent. I can imagine having some pretty wild and far-reaching discussions with a book group about this important and ambitious novel. Is it ready for the high school classroom? Hell no, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be reading it. Yu Hua is my new favorite author, and I will write more about To Live, the excellent and high school appropriate film based on one of his earlier novels, in another post.

[Anonymous]

For teachers interested in adding material relating to Japanese-American relations during the period beginning around 1900 and leading up to and including the attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent internment of Japanese people, I have a couple of background reading suggestions. The first is Kevin Starr's book "Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940-1950," especially Chapter 2, Shelling Santa Barbara. Starr does an excellent job of marshaling the available evidence for a redefinition of the war in the Pacific as not merely a second theater of the war in Europe, but as a "hot war" moment in the long "California-Japanese War" from 1898-1948. He is particularly good on how the state of California battled with the federal government for the right to legally discriminate against Japanese people during a period in which the countries were ostensibly allied.
The other book is more for fun, as it is a work of historical fiction. James Ellroy--you may have read his book LA Confidential, or at least seen the movie--has a new novel coming out on September 11, 2014. It's called "Perfidia," and it is set in Los Angeles in the month of December, 1941. It's the story of how corrupt LAPD cops made money from real estate scams associated with the internment, and it's got a great cast of rogues, including a heroic Japanese-American chemist who gets mixed up with the wrong crowd. Lots of fun, and full of provocative insight into the SoCal zeitgeist, circa 1940.

[Anonymous]

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Because many of my students are English learners, they find reading to be very challenging. To make their reading activities a little less stressful, and also to create more interest in what they are reading, I often use graphic novels. The amount of reading text is greatly shortened, and visual cues are provided by the illustrations. This serves to lower the anxiety levels of my students and makes them more interested in completing the readings and the assignments that accompany them.

One pair of graphic novels that I have just finished reading are Boxers and Saints by Gene Luen Yang. Previously, Yang also authored and illustrated another graphic novel titled American Born Chinese, a semi-autobiographical work about growing up as a Chinese American, another great read. Boxers and Saints form a two book mini series. They are both about the rise and fall of the Chinese Boxer Rebellion, which took place in the late 1890’s. The Boxer Rebellion was an attempt to drive Europeans and Americans out of China. The rebels themselves were mainly peasants and ordinary people who were angered by the abuse and injustice they suffered from the Europeans and Americans who were exerting their powers over the Chinese government, which was very weak at the time. While the graphic novels provide some historical details about the Boxer Rebellion, they are not intended to be strictly historically accurate accounts of the incident.

Both novels are told from the perspective of a child who becomes caught up in the madness of the Box Rebellion. In Boxers, the development of the Boxer Rebellion movement is told from the perspective of a boy named Little Bao. The novel chronicles his experiences as a eight year old child to his eventual rise as a key leader of the Boxer Rebellion. The events that lead to Little Bao’s hatred of foreigners and his use of mysticism and magic as a weapon are chronicled in the novel. I felt Yang’s telling of the story emphasized the complexities of the Boxer Rebellion. We empathize with Little Boa when he and his fellow Chinese are humiliatingly abused by arrogant and uncaring Europeans in their own country. His father is irrevocably crippled when he is pistol whipped by foreigners. A foreign priest ironically and unjustly punishes the people in Little Boa’s village when defending a Chinese member of his church. All of these events clearly convey the frustration and anger many Chinese felt towards foreigners during this period.

However, Yang also provides what I felt to be an honest and unsparing look at Little Bao’s transformation into a rebel. Initally, Little Bao merely fights and kills those who are unjust, such as bandits who prey on helpless villagers. But we become horrified when he begins to kill innocent people, both European and Chinese Christians, merely because they are different. Anything that is different from Chinese values and traditions is viewed as a threat and mercilessly destroyed. Horrifically, the death toll starts rising when such extremist views are embraced. Another interesting aspect of the novel is Yang’s emphasis on the religious/mystical aspects of the Boxer Rebellion. Little Boa’s incorporation of Chinese folk religion and mysticism allow him to gain many followers. Psychologically, these religious/mystical aspects of the Boxer movement allowed its followers to justify their horrific deeds while also giving them the confidence to rebel against the militarily superior Europeans. Yang’s portrayal of Little Bao and his role in the Boxer Rebellion attempts to provide a more complex view of this tragic event.

Saints is told from the perspective of a peasant girl who becomes caught up events that lead to the Boxer Rebellion and its inevitable conclusion. The girl, named “Four-Girl,” is born to a family which doesn't want another female child. Her name is the consequence of her grandfather’s refusal to give her a proper name because he is so disappointed by her birth. When “Four-Girl” grows older, she converts to Christianity and is given the name Vibiana. The novel chronicles the reasons for her conversion to Christianity and how it changes her life. Like Little Bao, Vibiana also has brushes with the supernatural, specifically visions of angels and Joan of Arc. Inspired and emboldened by her visions, Vibiana wishes to become a woman warrior to defend the powerless. Yang sets up a plot in which the paths of Little Bao and Viviana eventually intersect. This intersection of their lives leads to a dramatic and shocking conclusion to the novel.

What I liked about Yang’s account of the Boxer Rebellion is that it tells the story from the personal perspectives of two young people. I think teens will enjoy this aspect of the two graphic novels because it will allow them to relate to and empathize with the characters and the causes they embraced. It will also allow them to gain deeper insights into the dynamics of uprisings and make them aware that things are often much more complex than the historical or official reports made about uprisings and rebellions.

[Anonymous]

These are some great recommendations. I am very excited to read some. One novel that I recommend reading is Dream of the Red Chamber or The Story of the Stone. It is such an amazing novel and is viewed as a masterpiece in Chinese Literature.

[Rob_Hugo@PortNW]

. . . of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell is as good a place to start as any.

I'm 180 pages in and absorbing a lot about the interaction between Dutch and Japanese at the turn of the 19th century. While it's a bit later than my medieval history class covers (we pretty much leave Japan after the Tokugawa shogunate takes control in the 1600s), I'm getting a lot of good context about the shogun-daimyo-samurai-peasant structure which I go over in great detail for my 7th graders. I'm also appreciating the chance to see more of the opportunities available to Japanese peasants, which the history curriculum I use tends to gloss over. I don't have much idea where the story's heading - it seems like kind of a doomed romantic fable, but just introduced a new narrative perspective in the form of a Japanese herbalist wild woman, so who knows - but I think it'd be interesting for anyone whose curriculum touches on Japan during that time period.

As an aside, Mitchell is an Englishman who's spent a lot of time in Japan and absorbed a lot of information about their culture and values. When my book club talked about Cloud Atlas, we got some mileage out of one character's attitude about suicide, which reflected the honorable stance of Japanese seppuku and rejected Western notions that killing oneself = cowardice. I know that's oversimplified but it's always useful to get another point of view on hot-button issues.

[Author]

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