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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
Thomas Carter has commented on (9) products
Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong
by
Susan Blumberg-Kason
Thomas Carter
, July 11, 2014
A true cautionary tale for any romantics abroad who believe that exotic intrigue is enough to sustain an interracial marriage, Good Chinese Wife will wrench hearts as much as it will enrage readers on both sides of the gender debate. Susan Blumberg-Kason is a shy, frizzy-haired American exchange student in Hong Kong, where she meets an attractive Chinese scholar ten years her senior. Waltzing their nights away in dance halls, the previously married Cai doesn’t waste time. “In China couples traditionally date only if they plan to marry.” Susan’s insecurity, which is her biggest folly, gets the best of her, and gets hitched, simply so “I’d no longer worry about whether he’d still want to meet me every night.” The realities of marrying into China, however, become apparent during a visit to Wuhan to meet her in-laws. “Kids don’t learn anything until they are five. The baby can stay with us, for several years,” her new “mama” exclaims. Cai’s true colors are also soon revealed: he prefers to watch porn on their honeymoon instead of consummate their marriage, and play cards with pals in their underwear instead of spend time with his new wife. Feeling “like a lowly daughter-in-law in a Chinese backwater town,” Susan persuades Cai to relocate to San Francisco, where they conceive a son. Flying in the in-laws proves to be a mistake, and the ensuing childcare differences (force feeding; four layers of clothes indoors) will resonate with Westerners considering breeding with the Chinese. Cai becomes increasingly sullen and verbally abusive (“No meaning, no anything here,” he huffs. “I thought you had a wife and son here,” Susan responds, to which he snaps “You’re so lucky I don’t hit you.”). Wishing he’d go back to China only fuels her paranoia that, if he actually does, Cai will take their son with him (“China hasn’t signed the Hague Convention,” a lawyer warns). Susan’s grand finale “escape” will leave women readers woot-woot!’ing aloud, and fathers instinctively gritting their teeth. It’s hard to be critical of an intensely personal memoir such as this, but the authoress offers little self-examination other than the occasional “was my tone too harsh?”, nor any insight into Cai’s perspective except his outbursts: “I know what American wives are like. I also know what Chinese wives are like. And then there’s you!” And Susan’s final musing that “I was abandoning him in a country he didn’t like, taking away his son, and leaving him with a house, two cars and no way to pay the mortgage or other bills” could also come across as vindictive rather than remorseful. Good Chinese Wife is a fascinating read for anyone suffering a dose of yellow fever and contains topical issues that are certain to generate heated debates about custody and cultural differences. Yet one wonders if Susan and Cai might have made it work had they remained on Hong Kong’s east-west cultural middle ground, where they met, without the pressure of the Mainland’s blind filial piety or the influence of divorce-happy Americans. ###
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How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? True Stories of Expat Women in Asia
by
Young, Shannon
Thomas Carter
, July 01, 2014
“Fempat” is a new word that was coined during the controversy surrounding last year’s debut of my own China expat anthology, Unsavory Elements, and while it is wrongly attributed to me, my defining it in media interviews as “those angry, lonely, single female expats in China who are overlooked by western males seeking Chinese girlfriends” only served to secure it in the lexicon of world travel terminology. The latest collection of stories by expatriate women in Asia, How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit?, was being assembled and edited at the same time as Unsavory’s “fempat” fallout, and editor Shannon Young does not hesitate to touch on the topic in her introduction: “Too often expat women’s voices go unheard. We are labeled and dismissed…” What follows in theses 26 true tales, however, is not the call to arms by broads abroad male readers not unlike myself might fear it to be, but more of a “traveler’s soliloquy to prove my independence” (borrowed from ever-quotable contributor Kaitlin Solimine) as women of the world. Neha Mehta compares India’s lack of personal space with Bangkok (“When you object, they get infuriated and suddenly they are no longer human”); American-born Edna Zhou distinguishes ethnicity from nationality in the P.R.C. (“The person’s face changed from being impressed by the foreigner who speaks Mandarin to disgusted at the Chinese girl whose tones weren’t perfect”); and, in one of the collections more potentially divisive essays, privileged expat wife India Harris owns up to being the face of Filipina maid abuse (“Please, ma’am, I need work. My daughter is hungry. I don’t care. That’s your problem”). Romantic interludes are refreshingly balanced out with rocky relationships: Susan Blumberg-Kason in Hong Kong addresses infidelity in a mixed-race marriage (“Please know that in Chinese culture husbands might cheat, but it doesn’t mean they don’t love their wives”); Jocelyn Eikenburg brings her new Chinese father-in-law along on a Huangshan honeymoon (“He probably just thought all foreigners are a little ‘luan’, promiscuous”); and the aforementioned Kaitlin Solimine lets slip a tragic love story during hard-seat travel through China, admitting “I’m too preoccupied with my own narrative of romantic tragedy.” Shannon Young does a fine job as editor, weaving fun travel jaunts with intensely personal domestic revelations to keep the pace lively and, dare I say, feminine. ###
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Three Souls
by
Chang, Janie
Thomas Carter
, May 07, 2014
A young woman of privilege raised on the cusp of civil war in 1920s China longs to break free from the aristocratic shackles of her family’s feudal wealth. Book-smart and impertinent, Song Leiyin has no desire for the “comfortable life of a wife and mother” awaiting her. Heeding Madame Sun Yat-Sen’s call, she applies for a scholarship to university, but her unflinchingly old-fashioned father dismisses it as a flight of fancy. “This was the first time she realized education was only meant to increase her value in the marriage market.” Following her first failed attempt to deceive her father, a husband is hastily arranged for Leiyin. Motherhood tempers her angst, but the reemergence of an old flame, who also happens to be a wanted socialist sympathizer, sets off a slippery slope of betrayal, ultimately resulting in her death. This is not a spoiler; this is just the beginning! Leiyin’s three souls ��" her yin, yang, and hun ��" must right her past wrongs in order to ascend to the afterlife. At once a supernatural fantasy, romantic drama and historical thriller, first-time Taiwanese authoress Janie Chang is to be applauded for creating such a haunting story of love, politics and the beyond. ###
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Yang Shen, the God from the West, Book I (2nd Edition)
by
James Lande
Thomas Carter
, May 07, 2014
In the grand tradition of ambitious nautical classics Tai-Pan and the Aubrey-Maturin series, James Lande’s debut novel Yang Shen brings us back to the well-sailed yet never-dull seas of 1800’s Imperial China. The southern coast is in the bloody throws of the Taiping Rebellion and tens of thousands of pissed-off peasants are descending on Shanghai. The waning Manchu-led government’s only recourse is to retain American sailor Fletcher Thorson Wood (based on real-life soldier-of-fortune Frederick Townsend Ward and his “Ever Victorious Army”) to train a ragtag band of Chinese soldiers in the Western military style. It is obvious from the first page that Lande has invested as much time researching this rich period piece as he has crafting an elaborate story. Yang Shen is an historian’s historical fiction, replete with extensive glossary, detailed maps, captain’s logs and technical interlinears. The Far East setting provides Lande, a deft storyteller, with a vast expanse of literary canvas; perhaps too vast: coming in at a self-indulgently dense 555 pages (in 8-point typeset with half-inch margins, which translates into 2,000-pages in standard format) oddly interspersed with hanzi, even this insatiable history buff had his attention span tested. And this is just the first volume! ###
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Telegraph Hill
by
John F. Nardizzi
Thomas Carter
, April 06, 2014
“San Francisco: where you went when no one was talking to you anymore.” So illustrates the ostracized tone of Telegraph Hill, the new neo crime noir penned by real-life private eye John Nardizzi that is just as much about finding as it is being lost. Sculpted after the PI pulp of days past, Nardizzi covers a tried and true page-turning formula: disenchanted detective tracking down an elusive prostitute who witnessed a gang shooting before blood-thirsty Chinese triads get to her first. The story encompasses all the classic requisites of an urban thriller - narrow escapes, sexy femme fatales, investigative interludes and violent crescendos - but is refreshingly countered with cheek towards clichéd noir symbols (“He wondered why steam still drifted from manholes in the 21st century”). The author squeezes in, at times a bit forced, nearly every Bay Area landmark, but might have done better with a retro ‘70s setting, as today’s triad syndicates, mostly operating through legitimate multinational corporations, are not nearly as prevalent nor trigger-happy as portrayed. Where this novel stands apart, then, is the lyrical prose and intimate observations of lesser-known S.F. neighborhoods and their respective counter-cultures (The Tenderloin “where trannys look better than the real women”). Chinese cultural references and scenes in Hong Kong appealed to this San Francisco City native living as an expatriate in China, as did the subtle themes of displacement, from the cast-out protagonist to the astray prostitute (“She realized there was no one here for her anymore”). ###
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Behind the Red Door
by
Richard Burger
Thomas Carter
, January 17, 2013
Among the many misimpressions westerners tend to have of China, sex as some kind of "taboo" topic here seems to be the most common, if not clichéd. Forgetting for a moment that, owing to a population of 1.3 billion, somebody must be doing it, what most of us don't seem to know is that, at several points throughout the millennia, China has been a society of extreme sexual openness. And now, according to author Richard Burger's new book Behind the Red Door, the Chinese are once again on the verge of a sexual revolution. Best know for his knives-out commentary on The Peking Duck, one of China's longest-running expat blogs, Burger takes a similar approach to surveying the subject of sex among the Sinae, leaving no explicit ivory carving unexamined, no raunchy ancient poetry unrecited, and *ahem* no miniskirt unturned. Opening (metaphorically and literally) with an introduction about hymen restoration surgery, Burger delves dàndàn-deep into the olden days of Daoism, those prurient practitioners of free love who encouraged multiple sex partners as "the ultimate co-joining of Yin and Yang." Promiscuity, along with prostitution, flourished during the Tang Dynasty - recognized as China's cultural zenith - which Burger's research surmises is no mere coincidence. Enter the Yuan Dynasty, and its conservative customs of Confucianism, whereby sex became regarded only "for the purpose of producing heirs." As much as we love to hate him, Mao Zedong is credited as single-handedly wiping out all those nasty neo-Confucius doctrines, including eliminating foot binding, forbidding spousal abuse, allowing divorce, banning prostitution (except, of course, for Party parties), and encouraging women to work. But in typical fashion, laws were taken too far; within 20 years, China under Mao became a wholly androgynous state. We then transition from China's red past into the pink-lit present, whence "prostitution is just a karaoke bar away," yet possession of pornography is punishable by imprisonment - despite the fact that millions of single Chinese men (called "bare branches") will never have wives or even girlfriends due to gross gender imbalance. Burger laudably also tackles the sex trade from a female's perspective, including an interview with a housewife-turned-hair-salon hostess who, ironically, finds greater success with foreigners than with her own sex-starved albeit ageist countrymen. Western dating practices among hip, urban Chinese are duly contrasted with traditional courtship conventions, though, when it comes down to settling down, Burger points out that the Chinese are still generally resistant to the idea that marriage can be based on love. This topic naturally segues into the all-but-acceptable custom of kept women ("little third"), as well as "homowives", those tens of millions of straight women trapped in passionless unions with closeted gay men out of filial piety. Behind the Red Door concludes by stressing that while the Chinese remain a sexually open society at heart, contradictive policies (enforced by dubious statistics) designed to discard human desire are written into law yet seldom enforced, simply because "sexual contentment is seen as an important pacifier to keep society stable and harmonious." ###
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The Great Walk of China: Travels on Foot from Shanghai to Tibet
by
Graham Earnshaw
Thomas Carter
, January 06, 2012
Graham Earnshaw is a true man of the People. His 30-year tenure in China as a journalist, businessman and, most recently, publishing magnate, have made him a permanent fixture in the Shanghai scene - which is exactly why Earnshaw makes it a point of de-fixing himself at least once a month to walk in the countryside and "speak to the Real China." It is an ongoing journey that he has tasked himself with completing since 2004, and though not continuous, Earnshaw has thus far traversed over 3% of the earth's circumference between Shanghai and Tibet. ON FOOT! The Great Walk of China, Earnshaw's published travelogue, is an account of just a fraction of his epic odyssey, covering the interior provinces of Anhui, Hubei, Chongqing and Sichuan. The walk is a straight line due west through some of China's most rural regions, which is exactly the serene backdrop Earnshaw, fluent in Putonghua (and at times more literate than the Chinese he meets), prefers in a concerted effort to talk to as many People as possible. From the spontaneous hospitality of peasants whom have never before seen a foreigner in the flesh, to the paranoid reactions of low-level authorities who simply cannot grasp what he is doing venturing into the countryside, Earnshaw manages to interact with just about every class of citizen imaginable. Earnshaw also brilliantly illustrates the ironies of modern China's identification crisis through villagers who exclaim "we are poor" out of habit despite clutching state-of-the-art mobile phones, and students, many the first in their family to be literate yet completely devoid of ambition, who vapidly waste their days away in front of televisions. Often, the farmers he encounters hope Earnshaw is a reporter out to expose the rampant corruption of rural officials, while officials are worried that he is there to report on their corruption. "Are you corrupt?" Earnshaw toyingly asks one cadre. "Me, corrupt? No...well...I'm not in a position to be..." A shopkeeper eavesdropping on their dialogue suddenly howls in delight: "So it's not that you don't want to be corrupt, ha-ha-ha!!!" Englishman Earnshaw deftly manages some clever responses to his frequent confrontations with backwoods police, all the while maintaining a pleasant, non-judgmental (and at times romanticized and overly-optimistic) perspective which distinguishes The Great Walk from all the other China travelogues out there. Our narrator is, unfortunately, reluctant to share much personal insight into Graham Earnshaw the person, and keeps his writings strictly about the Chinese. In between chatting with the proletariat, Earnshaw pauses to comment on old propaganda slogans still found on countryside walls, and muse on tiny animals crossing busy roads - a metaphor, perhaps, for the People of China's struggle to catch up with their nation's rapid progress. ### Tom Carter is the author of CHINA: Portrait of a People
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Eating Smoke One Mans Descent Into Drug Psychosis in Hong Kongs Triad Heartland Chris Thrall
by
Chris Thrall
Thomas Carter
, December 01, 2011
What just might be the funniest if not first autobiography ever penned by a drug-addicted foreigner in China, Chris Thrall's “Eating Smoke” contains more spiritual pollution than all of the titles on the Communist Party's banned books list combined. In a country whose history was irrevocably altered for the worst by the scourge of foreign-imported opium throughout the 19th century, it is no wonder that today’s China has one of the world’s least-tolerant anti-drug laws - including executions for traffickers. Basically, buying or selling drugs in China is a really stupid idea. Enter Chris “I’m not a stupid guy, just an average guy who does stupid things” Thrall, a 25 year-old Royal Marine who hastily quits the service to pursue a business venture in 1990’s-era Hong Kong, a city “where situations can only get worse,” just to find himself broke, homeless and fulfilling his own ominous prophecy. Recalling the commando’s motto of “cheerfulness under adversity,” Thrall tries to make the best of his lowly situation by spending his time dancing in discos or hanging out in the notorious Chungking Mansions, “the world’s all-time greatest doshouse.” The immigrant ghetto of Kowloon is not, however, the best influence on Thrall, who befriends all the wrong people, including a hebephile drug dealer from Ghana and a Filipina working girl, and soon succumbs to that favorite of Chungking pastimes - drugs. To fund his new crystal meth habit, our detritivorous narrator forages the South China city-by-the-sea like a bottom-feeder for any job that will hire a white face. From cubicle fixture to phone-book scams, English teacher to nightclub DJ, businessman to bouncer, Thrall manages to get fired from every gig dumb enough to hire a spun-out “chi sun gweilo” (crazy foreigner in Cantonese) who doesn’t sleep for 9 days at a time and tends to forget his own surname. By the time Thrall reaches his last-resort of a job, as a doorman at a bar operated by the 14K, the largest Triad (Chinese crime family) in the world - he has been reduced to a hyper-paranoid shadow of his former self on the verge of drug psychosis. “I would listen to the radio phone-ins, suspicious of the Cantonese conversation and wondering if people were calling in to report my movements,” he describes during one of his many speed-soaked conspiracy theories. What ensues is a hilarious amphetamine-paced cautionary tale of what NOT to do when addicted to drugs in Wan Chai gangland, “where the Dai Lo's rule is law, pride is everything and life means nothing.” Chris Thrall’s true story evokes Gregory David Roberts’ “Shantaram” and Alex Garland’s “The Beach,” both of which have been licensed to Hollywood, as Eating Smoke is sure to follow. ### Tom Carter is the author of CHINA: Portrait of a People
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The Eurasian Face
by
Kirsteen Zimmern
Thomas Carter
, November 04, 2011
Hard to believe, but not fifty years have yet passed since the offspring of mixed couples in Asia were still seen as an unwanted byproduct of the West’s perceived subjugation over the East. To be sure, racism and discrimination against westerners continues to exist in various degrees of blatancy all across a newly-resurgent Asia, but if the fashion and entertainment industries are anything to go by, one thing is certain: Eurasians, once consigned to a purgatorial fate worse than being born of the lowest classes, are now all the rage. Kirsteen Zimmern's coffee table book, The Eurasian Face, features 70 photo-essays in celebration of Asia’s ever-expanding Eurasian nation. Hailing from the multicultural kingdom of Hong Kong, Zimmern confesses that, as a child, she used to chant "gwei lei ga, gwei lei ga!" (it’s a ghost!) at random Caucasian sightings despite the fact that she herself is partly of Scottish ancestry. Zimmern is now making reparations by granting her fellow Eurasians face time in the form of first-person profiles in which to share their stories. They are not celebrities, but rather, extraordinarily-ordinary civilians of hybrid heritage who comprise Hong Kong’s increasingly kaleidoscopic population. Some are unabashedly proud of their genetics, such as Lawrence Matthews, the son of a Chinese model and an Englishman ("I think there is some jealousy from non-Eurasians...after all, Eurasians are widely known to be the best looking"), while others, like Chinese/German Lisa Rosentreter, who grew up in Manitoba “embarrassed that my family's staple starch was rice,” struggled with their ambiguous ancestry. Stephen Fung, of Chinese/Irish/Scottish descent, recalls a butcher at Hong Kong’s wet market enquiring why he was so "funny looking". When told that it was Fung’s dad who was Chinese, “the butcher insisted on shaking my hand, saying that it wasn't every day that ‘one of us Chinese guys gets together with a white woman.’” Cantonese/Irish Liam Fitzpatrick, a senior writer for Time Magazine who was born in late-60s Hong Kong, offers a more poignant reflection of his mixed-blood upbringing: “We were surrounded by a jeering mob of leftists, calling (my mother) a foreigner’s erohw and me her dratsab half-breed.” Race seems to play less of a factor in these subjects’ lives than their upbringing, which is described in Zimmern’s book as “Chinese morals with western social habits.” Many are in favor of the Eurasian ethnicity being officially recognized as a domiciled community (“we always have to tick the 'Others' box when filling out forms”), while just as many do not, including Chinese-Brit Sarah Fung, who declares "it's as crass and patronizing as lumping Chinese, Japanese and Korean together because they come under the umbrella of "Asian." As an aside, it is this photographer’s critical opinion that, to better study the “genetic legacy etched upon their faces,” the portraits would have benefited from studio sessions rather than candid snapshots. Another flaw is the choice of black and white film; skin tones are vital for visually discerning someone’s ethnicity, not to mention that B&W is negatively symbolic of exactly the sort of outlook which Eurasians seek to eradicate. ### Tom Carter is the author of CHINA: Portrait of a People
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