If you’re also looking to diversify your bookshelf this year, or if you’re interested in discovering more works by Filipino women writers, here’s a list of my current must-reads — from poetry to cozy mystery and historical fiction — to help you get started!

Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala

This cozy mystery has everything you need: a hilarious protagonist, a surprise murder, and lots of delicious food. But instead of an idyllic manor house or a charming British village as its setting, you’ll find 25-year-old Lila Macapagal trying to solve a murder that takes place in a Filipino restaurant.

After a horrible breakup, Lila moves back to her quaint hometown of Shady Palms, Illinois, for some peace and quiet. But when her ex-boyfriend suddenly drops dead in her aunt’s restaurant — after having eaten a dish Lila cooked — the Macapagal family needs to work together to prove her innocence.

Buy a copy of Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala

When the Elephants Dance by Tess Uriza Holthe

For all the historical fiction and magical realism lovers out there, this book’s for you. Holthe’s debut novel follows a Filipino family as they struggle to stay alive during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in World War II.

Finding refuge in the cellar of a house a short distance away from Manila, they pass the time telling magical stories based on Filipino legends and myths. As they wait for Japan to finally surrender to the United States, they slowly build up hope through their stories and become determined to fight for their freedom.

If you need any more reason to check this book out, here’s a fun fact: the stories that the characters share with each other in the cellar are based on stories that Holthe was told by her own Filipino father and grandmother.

Buy a copy of When the Elephants Dance by Tess Uriza Holthe

Chloe and the Kaishao Boys by Mae Coyiuto

If you’re a fan of rom-coms and young adult novels, look no further! Coyiuto’s newest novel follows Chloe Liang, a Chinese Filipino teenager living in Manila, who dreams of studying at the University of Southern California and becoming an animator.

The main issue in her life? Her father wants her to study somewhere closer to home, so he sets her up on a series of arranged dates in the hopes that she’ll change her mind. Will Chloe end up studying abroad, or will she meet someone who just might convince her to stay? You’ll have to read to find out!

Buy a copy of Chloe and the Kaishao Boys by Mae Coyiuto

In the Country by Mia Alvar

In the mood for something shorter? This short story collection features nine globe-trotting tales about Filipinos all around the world, from the Philippines and the United States to the Middle East.

Alvar explores the lives of different Filipinos living at home and abroad in stories such as “The Kontrabida,” which centers around a pharmacist-turned-drug smuggler living in New York, and “The Miracle Worker,” which tells the story of a Filipino teacher hired by a wealthy Bahraini woman to teach her disabled daughter.

Buy a copy of In the Country

The Farm by Joanne Ramos

If The Handmaid’s Tale is one of your favorite books, The Farm might just be right up your alley too. Ramos’ bestselling novel is set in Golden Oaks, a fictional facility in the Hudson Valley akin to a luxurious retreat — you’ve got free daily massages, delicious food, access to private fitness trainers, and more. However, anyone who wants access to these amenities has to give up something valuable: their freedom.

The Farm is a dystopian novel told through multiple perspectives and details the experiences that women at Golden Oaks endure to produce babies for their rich clients. During every nine-month stay, these women become “hosts” and cannot leave the facility. But what happens when certain truths about Golden Oaks are slowly revealed and paradise turns into a nightmare?

Buy a copy of The Farm by Joanne Ramos

I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir by Malaka Gharib

In this moving coming-of-age story filled with colorful illustrations, Gharib sheds light on her experiences growing up in the United States as the daughter of a Filipino mother and Egyptian father.

Throughout her childhood, she grapples with fitting in with her fellow American peers and learning about the differences between the cultures and traditions of both sides of her large family. If you’ve ever questioned your identity and culture during your adolescence, this book might just speak to you.

Buy a copy of I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir

Letters to a Young Brown Girl by Barbara Jane Reyes

If poetry’s more your thing, or if you’ve made it a goal to read more poetry this year, give this book a try. Reyes’ sixth collection of poems explore themes such as self-love and power through the voice of the Brown Girl, who is fed up with being called foreign and unwanted.

Reyes, who was born in Manila and raised in California, addresses the struggles that many Filipino Americans and immigrant women of color face on an everyday basis in relation to ethnicity, race, nationality, gender, and religion.

Buy a copy of Letters to a Young Brown Girl

About the author: Isabella Peralta is a writer with Reedsy a marketplace, and blog that helps authors with everything from finding helpful writing templates to hiring a ghostwriter and more.

That is, along with her novel Bright – released at the same time as this collection. After reading these stories, I’m so grateful to Mui Poopoksakul for translating so elegantly and beautifully, and for granting us access these wonderful stories (Read our interview with Mui here).

Through these stories, we have gained otherwise impossible access to this insight into the everyday lives of working-class Thailand. Meeting these characters, who have been worn down and often failed by society, is frequently uncomfortable for the reader; despite that, this is one of the most gripping collections I’ve come across in years.

“Even now, he still couldn’t believe that he ended up a man with nothing to show for all those years. He’d given it everything he had; there was nothing more he could have given”.

The characters in Arid Dreams are all trapped, in one way or another. Either by their circumstances, their own negative behavioural patterns, or by learned stereotypes. The men are foolish and often unpleasant. The archetype of toxic masculinity – arrogant men ready to impart their ‘wisdom’ on the reader with great confidence – is strong here.

These are the men you find in the comments sections on articles, the ones that can’t be reasoned with and yet make you want to try anyway.

This running theme reaches its most absurd heights in The Final Secret of Inmate Black Tiger. When a man on death row writes to his friend to solve a final problem for him, we find out he doesn’t fear death and this favour doesn’t involve a family member but rather his own member.

He once told a prostitute that he didn’t have a penis and is worried that he’ll go to the grave never having corrected her. He’s genuinely more concerned with the legacy of his penis than his own. “I’ll probably die with my eyes wide open if a woman is under the impression that I don’t have that ”.

Often the women are silenced in these stories; in Men’s Rights Namfon is beaten black and blue by her husband Wasu for taking a lover. No discussion is had except that he makes her quit her job and stay home – she then runs away. The town instantly brands her a slut – “she was born that way”.

He struggles with life and hunts her down, self-consumed with his own bad luck, undoubtedly, bestowed upon him by his given name Ratom (Misery). Not once in this story, despite a fiery conclusion where Wasu and the lover Boonleua fight and discuss trading their wives, does Namfon speak and, instead, we’re treated to the inner monologues of this obsessive, abusive man.

“After a certain point, you have to allow women the honor of choosing.’ Boonleua disagreed, but didn’t respond.”

In the first and titular story Arid Dreams, a man is obsessed with the local woman Jiew. He finds out she’s a prostitute but that she only sleeps with farang (white people) as they’re likely visiting and she doesn’t want to be the gossip of the town.

He talks to her and gets to know her because she’ll become less attractive to him. She’s only beautiful when she’s a mystical unattainable creature and not a real person who’s working several jobs and taking care of her sick mother.

“I realized that, with women you’ll never stand a chance of sleeping with, it’s better to learn as much as you can about them, until lust gives way to other feelings”.

Notably, many of the issues in this collection arise from a lack of communication, husbands and wives don’t discuss their issues and everything is assumed. For example, in Within These Walls, a woman feels her life has been run by her husband’s choices fixating on how she couldn’t even choose her own wallpaper.

She now feels guilty because he’s in a critical state in hospital and this is only hitting her now, she’s not grieving for him at all. In the second and most chilling story, Wood Children Pakrob and his wife Mala are struggling to conceive, Mala takes to a solitary existence of carving crude babies out of wood taking care to know their individual personalities.

“This one had an expressionless face, neither smiling nor crying. She thought that children who appeared impassive were more intriguing. These were the children whose minds searched far and wide to ponder”

Instead of talking to his wife and addressing her rapidly declining mental heal, he brings home a child of a friend for her to play with and tosses away her carving knife.

Rest assured it doesn’t go well. Often when these dysfunctional couples do eventually talk, things go very wrong as they’ve kept their own dreams and feelings pushed down for so long.

The stories are often absurd but they all demonstrate very unhappy, unfulfilled people being forced into a life they didn’t want in one way or another.

A life of drudgery, unresolved dreams, and monotony gets to them. Often quite literally, like the elevator attendant who feels useless “if I had been born with only a head and an index finger, this job would be suitable for me”, he dreams of his active childhood on the farm when anything was possible: “every part of my body would come alive so I could run, run on a path of my choosing”. A person waits at the bus stop with a forgotten wallet hoping the person will come back to get it in a Waiting for Godot-esque situation.

Conclusion

Although the stories generally end with some sort of sting in the tail, the characters are often left in stasis or under the stark light of reality their problems unresolved and often amplified.

This is a slice of life if ever I saw one; problems are rarely resolved in life, particularly for working-class people where they tend to simply snowball or stay as there are and this is what we have here.  The title ‘Arid Dreams’ perfectly captures the situation each of these women and men have found themselves in.

“Because we humans had limited options, the choice to do something hopeless had to be made by those who refused to abandon hope in its entirety”

Personally, this was what I needed to get out of a recent reading slump; I got lost in the incredible characterisation and detail of the worlds in which these characters reside. Cultural nuances are woven in effortlessly.

The collection also flows incredibly well; often with short stories, you can be starkly torn from one story you didn’t want to leave and thrown into another where you don’t care about the characters as much — this can be frustrating.

However, with Arid Dreams, you genuinely believe that these characters are from the same world, both physically and mentally, and never for a moment is it jarring, making for an honest-to-god page-turner. “We coexisted in close proximity on this planet. Nevertheless, we led a solitary existence.”  I really hope we all get to read more of Pinwana in the future.

UK Publisher: Tilted Axis Press

US Publisher: Feminist Press

Read More: Tokyo Uneo Station by Yu Miri, Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin, or Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun.

Thailand is a nation with an incredibly rich and splendid history. A free nation which has tied the way of life that is Buddhism into its very culture, food, and traditions.

There’s a reason so many of us crave  Thailand holidays more than any others in South East Asia. Thai temples, architecture, food, religion, and political history can be traced back hundreds upon hundreds of years, and all of it is utterly engrossing and fascinating.

Books to Read Before You Visit Thailand

We urge you, before your Thailand holidays, to check out some of these wonderful books, or take them with you! With these books, you can both learn about the rich and colourful history of Thailand and discover the breadth of imagination in its authors and artists.

The Sad Part Was by Prabda Yoon

translated by Mui Poopoksakul

The Sad Part Was is a collection of translated stories gathered from Prabda Yoon’s earlier collections, though the majority are from his 2000 collection Kwam Na Ja Pen, which won him the 2002 S.E.A. Write Award.

Published by the wonderful Tilted Axis and translated into English by Mui Poopoksakul, the stories here show off Yoon’s ability to interweave heartstring tugging sorrow with a laugh out loud sense of wit. In Shallow/Deep, Thick/Thin the narrator laments “I hold so much knowledge inside me, it’s practically oozing out of my pores.

Why does no one want to know what I know?”, a sentiment which holds true for many of the protagonists in these stories.

Yoon seems eager to reveal the depths of feeling and thoughtfulness fermenting away inside the heads of ordinary people. Tong-Jai, the young narrator of A Schoolgirl’s Diary struggles to understand why 1 + 1 must always be 2, in the face of her teacher’s mounting frustration she learns the valuable lesson that “answering in accordance with the opinion of the majority was a requisite for getting by in life”.

There is an especially beautiful moment when after said teacher has snapped and cries guilty tears at what she has done, Tong-Jai reflects “Suppose a teardrop falls and combines with another teardrop, that makes one big teardrop…”

Pen In Parentheses explores the relationship between memories and objects through the delayed grief of a philosophically bent director of TV adverts and his recollections of watching movies as a child with his grandparents, leaving us with the sad reality of how the objects remain long after the people who conferred sentimental value on them have passed away.

The Crying Parties further explores the theme of grief and the contingency of our connections to others when a group of acquaintances who used to regularly meet together for ‘crying parties’ where they’d induce themselves to states of crying decide to meet up for one final session after the death of the one group member any of them actually felt any sense of friendship towards.

Elsewhere the stories take a more experimental and metafictional turn with Something In The Air in which an already freak accident is made even more bizarre by the oddly self-referential dialogue of the couple who discover it.

Marut By The Sea sees the first person narrator directly calling out and challenging his very creator by berating Yoon himself. There’s something of Paul Auster in these two stories yet with a greater sense of solidity and involvement which is something I’ve always felt a lot of Auster’s work lacks.

All in all The Sad Part Was showcases a writer who is versatile in his craft, capable of bold originality and is clearly trying to carve himself out a distinct and welcome niche in Asian literature. A fantastic choice of novel to bring on your Thailand holidays.

Thailand’s Political History by Barend Jan Terwiel

Barend Jan Terwiel’s Thailand’s Political History is certainly the most academic book on this list, nevertheless, the Dutch historian aims to make the work readable to the layperson. It certainly packs a lot into its pages; starting from the 16^thcentury when Thailand was still Siam, and moving through the reigns of the most important kings and on through the 20^thcentury and into the 21^st.

The colourful assortment of rulers includes the military-captain-gone-rouge Taksin, simultaneously a trained Buddhist meditator and fearsome fighter, a man of the people whilst also being ruthless in his discipline and punishment; he fought many important campaigns against the Burmese.

Then there’s Thong Duang who became King Rama in 1782 and would go on to found the city of Bangkok, codify a lot of Thai law and introduce much ceremonial pomp into the culture.

King Mongkut’s reign saw a period of wearily opening relations with the Western powers, signing a peace treaty with the British in 1855 and in the subsequent years treaties with the Americans, French, Dutch and Portuguese among others.

He also appointed Anna Leonowens of The King And I fame to teach his children English.

His young successor King Chulalongkorn would prove to be bold, daring and original, attempting albeit unsuccessfully to abolish gambling, slavery and the traditional corvee system of indebted labour.

Terwiel details the wars and skirmishes fought with neighbouring Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia, as well as explaining how, through shrewd politics, Thailand managed to avoid ever being truly colonized.

Moving on to more recent times, the book explains the politically turbulent time Thailand has faced during the 20^th and 21^st centuries as she went through a revolving door of short periods of democratic rule interrupted by military coups.

Terwiel takes a no-nonsense approach to history, so it may not be the most thrilling of reads but it gives the reader the skeleton of Thailand before heading out on their Thailand holidays.

Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap

Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s debut Sightseeing consists of six short stories and a novella. All the stories are set in contemporary Thailand and Lapcharoensap’s mixed Thai-American heritage serves as an axis on which spins a vivid kaleidoscope of facets of the country’s culture viewed from native ground level and the outsider perspective of tourists and ex-pats.

Although packed with socio-political commentary dealing with a developing nation, Lapcharoensap never sacrifices the momentum of his plots or the plausibility of his characters in order to make his points.

There are dark set pieces and unpleasant encounters throughout but never does it feel as if we’re being subject to cliched or gratuitous ‘poverty porn’; and it’s in the midst of this darkness and hardship that we find tender and heartwarming humanity.

Lapcharoensap writes as someone who still has faith in the potential for goodness that arises not only from inside people, but more centrally to these stories, between them.

Farangs, a Thai term for ‘foreigner’, looks at tourism from the perspective of the local Thais who have to deal with the consequences (both material and emotional) of Western tourists who treat their country as a vice fuelled exotic playground for adults.

The titular piece confronts the sad reality that many of those who live in the countries most dependent on tourism often do not have the money or the opportunity to see their own homeland beyond their immediate neighbourhoods.

The story of a mother and son trip spurred by a medical misfortune, it puts a devastating twist on the expression sightseeing yet still leaves the reader with a warm sense of uplift at how the pair take strength from one another to face their adversities.

Priscilla the Cambodian looks at the plight of a settlement of Cambodian refugees near a Thai town and through the blossoming friendship between a little Cambodian girl and two local Thai boys holds a light up to how all too often prejudice and intolerance is something that we are taught rather than our natural instinct.

It’s not always that you can say of a short story collection that it lacks any weak pieces so it’s a testament to Lapcharoensap’s skill that he’s achieved that here, making it an ideal book to bring on your Thailand holidays.

Bangkok Found by Alex Kerr

Although Alex Kerr is best known for his expertise on Japanese art and traditional culture, by his middle years he was already spending 6 months a year in Bangkok, the city he now calls home.

Describing Bangkok Found as a sequel to his highly acclaimed Lost Japan, Kerr illuminates Thai art and culture with the same verve and unconcealed joy exhibited in his writings on Japan.

He’s a nerd in the very best sense of the word and the excitement he feels as he dives headfirst into the world of Thai antiques and art dealing is palpable.

This time round he considers himself as a true outsider to the country he is writing about, not having the same mastery of the language nor depth of historical knowledge he had of Japan, so one has the feeling of being perched on the shoulders of a wide-eyed child playing explorer.

More than just interesting, Bangkok Found is a genuinely useful tool for the traveller to Thailand; Kerr’s aim is to teach you how to ‘see’ the country, outlining several Thai cultural concepts that help you to make sense of the seemingly chaotic sensory overload.

Crucial to understanding Thailand’s aesthetic is an awareness of ‘Lai Thai’, the colourful design style that uses fractal patterns to create elaborate tile and flame shapes in order to make Thailand’s palaces and temples seem light, airy and ethereal, “Lai Thai is all about a beautiful surface, not necessarily about inner meaning”.

This combines with another core Thai concept, ‘Sanuk’, a sheer joy in existence that spurs one to try to derive pleasure and satisfaction from everything you do. This mix of weightless pleasure and dreamlike facade may not be to every traveller’s liking and Kerr summarises that

“One could say that a taste for fantasy is what decides whether a person is going to love Thai art or not”.

One of Thailand’s greatest gifts to the world is its food and Kerr gives a large section of the book over to recounting a conversation he had over dinner with a number of experts on Thai culture. This is probably the most enjoyable section of the book and furnishes the reader with another key concept, ‘saed’ which describes the zesty explosions of flavour contained within Thai foods.

Thai cuisine is a rich tapestry of borrowings and influences from the various peoples that have passed through, settled or brushed up against Thailand throughout her history.

Of particular interest to me was learning of the Muslim origin of my favourite Thai dish, massaman curry. And it’s this sense of the country as Asia’s melting pot that is the real take away from the book, from food to art, literature, language and even the very ethnic makeup of the people.

Bangkok is described as ‘a phoenix rising from the ashes of an older Asian culture’ and Thailand more widely as:

“a bowerbird, collecting bits of ribbon, twigs, iridescent insect wings, blue bottle caps, all sorts of shiny and pretty things, and weaving them together as decoration for its nest.”

If Terwiel gives us Thailand’s bones, Kerr gives us her blood and breath. To really understand the history and culture of the place before your Thailand holidays, this is a perfect place to start.

Read our review of Alex Kerr’s Lost Japan. 

Bright by Duanwad Pimwana

translated by Mui Poopoksakul

I remember sitting at a rooftop table in a shrimp restaurant full of Korean tourists at Bangkok’s popular Chatuchak night market. It’s a sprawling hot spot surrounded by high walls into one of which said shrimp restaurant was built.

Gazing over the wall to my right I could see a cluster of simple Thai houses and between them and the market wall was an overgrown field.

A group of young teens came out of the houses and started kicking a football around. I was struck by the normality of this scene happening just metres away from the hordes of travellers and holidaymakers like myself here as an escape from our own everydays; yet the two worlds were separated by walls both figurative and physical.

As tourists we tend to travel well-worn paths, which is fine, but it means that much of the dare-I-say-it? ‘real’ or ‘normal’ life of the country is only caught in fast glimpses as taxi’s speed us past residential streets on our way to hotels and sightseeing spots.

With Bright Duanwad Pimwana shines a light down the ends of those roads that would otherwise remain blank spaces at the edge of our periphery.

The novel (another feather in the cap of Mui Poopoksakul’s translation skills) takes place in and around a working-class housing project run by the stern Mrs Tongjan.

The community is off a main road but hidden behind an ‘arrogantly large property with vacation bungalows’ which effectively means ‘the community is completely cut off from curiosity’, making it a Thai any street.

The story centres on Kampol Changsamran, shortened to ‘Kam’ though often nicknamed simply as ‘Boy’. Kam finds himself in a sorry state as his parents’ separation leaves him effectively homeless; his mother faces undisclosed problems that are never fully explained though darkly hinted at, while his truck driver father desperately needs to take on extra work so leaves Kam in limbo waiting on the perennial tomorrow when he will be able to take him to their new home.

However, the inhabitants of the community rally around Kam in his time of need, sharing the burden of feeding and sheltering the boy.

Bright is both a coming of age story as Kam learns harsh life lessons in the face of his parents’ neglect, and simultaneously an illumination of the lives and ways of ordinary Thai people.

The book is broken up into short vignettes that show the various hi-jinks, mishaps, encounters and conversations that Kam engages in with the members of his community; in particular we see the kindly old store owner Chong grow to become a substitute father figure as well as the strengthening of the bond between Kam and his best friend Oan.

Although written in a social realist style, many of these short encounters impart some kind of essential wisdom on young Kam, giving the novel the feel more of a collection of urban fables.

Significant already for being the first novel by a Thai woman to appear in English translation, Bright will hopefully draw the same kind of attention to its author that she draws to Thailand’s working-class people.

Check out our interview with the wonderful translator of The Sad Part Was and Bright, Mui Poopoksakul. Or read Pimwana’s collection of short stories Arid Dreams.

Thailand’s history and literary scene is so dense and exciting, we’ve only just scratched the surface here.

Do some more digging of your own to find your perfect book to read before your Thailand holidays, or to take with you on your Thailand holidays.

Was there something lacking from said description? Maybe he found Hardy’s prose to be weighty and clunky? But no, this single quantitative declaration served as a complete and self-contained criticism and condemnation in the eyes of my friend. Wessex be damned. Try as I did to appeal to tonality, texture, atmosphere, I was met each time with ‘but three pages? For a fucking field!’.

Putting aside any discussion of the merits or demerits of Hardy as a writer, it highlights a limiting mindset that a great many readers and viewers adopt when they approach fiction – that everything must be solely for the streamlining and advancement of plot.

I suffer a strange paroxysm of irritation whenever I hear people say ‘I start reading a book and if I’m not gripped by the first page I put it down’. I think it echoes a similar sentiment to the one behind the too frequent complaint made of films and novels – that they are too slow – rarely are they branded too fast.

People speak as if there were an optimal cruising speed universally applicable across all works of fiction; no regards given to the particular and specific requirements of the individual work. Plot uber alles is a terribly limiting approach to take when engaging with literature and I’ve always found it better to enter a work without any pre-conceived expectations of where it should take you and by what means.

A rich and detailed environment can be an end in itself, an opportunity for readers to immerse themselves in lush and poetic prose. It can also serve as the very source from which the events and happenings of their stories derive if not their entire meaning then at least much of their animating force.

Think of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy and how much time is spent walking or riding across those remorseless frontiers.

The striking scene in Cities of the Plain where they lasso the wild dogs is given its visceral and poetic brutality by the harsh ground upon which it occurs, a ground that, over the course of the hundreds of pages previous, we’ve tread upon to the point that its unforgiving severity has almost become a character in itself. To think how much would have been missed if John Grady Cole and Billy Parham had had dirt bikes to ease their journeys.

Or to take another, and very different, example, what about something like Haruki Murakami’sTheWind Up Bird Chronicle? Although over the course of the novel we’re taken, via recollections and letters, to Malta and Mongolia and by supernatural means to a strange shadowy limbo world, most of the action centres around modern(ish) Tokyo and, in particular, Toru Okada’s tucked-away back street.

Whilst many key events do take place here, the location is just as important for its sheer normality, offsetting the magical realist elements as Murakami’s pacing allows us the time to settle in properly, sitting on Okada’s shoulder as he makes pasta, taking his home under our own skin which in turn makes the sense of otherness in the shadow realm more profound – like we really have been jolted out of reality.

What I liked most about the novel was its very slowness, being a guest in Murakami’s Tokyo. Location and setting do not always have to be the background for the story; the dynamic can be reversed, the story becoming the vehicle with which we pass through the environment.

This brings me to Galsan Tschinag’s The Blue Sky, a semi-autobiographical account of the author’s childhood growing up on the Mongolian steppes.

The Blue Sky by Galsan Tschinag

The Altai mountains, the setting for The Blue Sky, take on an omnipresent and seemingly omnipotent role – not only as background but also theme, character, and deus ex machina, to the nomadic families that wander their expanse (the author’s own tribe being amongst them).

It is a paradoxical landscape, simultaneously expansive and confining. As dramatic and wild as it seems – with its open skies and the wolves and horses that run beneath them – as nomads, it is the seasons and the weather that dictate the pace of their lives: where and when they move and whether to feel fear or hope. Our narrator feels a spiritual sense of humbleness in his relation to the world:

“Compared to me, the world was incomparably awesome as it lay in front of me in all its mystery”

Yet at the same time, from up high in the mountains, he can also see to the edges of his world. At one point he describes sitting on a rock watching as his father journey to the big city for business: a journey that, within the context of his nomad’s life, marks a significant absence of a few days, yet he is still able to view his father all the way to the city, even as a tiny dot he is still visible from up high.

It’s a perfect setting to tell a coming-of-age story whilst simultaneously detailing the changing cultural climate of Mongolia. At one point after listening to the grown-ups chat about trade and possessions the narrator muses “Apparently, the older you got, the more things you had to have”, relating not just to his apprehensions as to approaching adulthood; but also the encroachment of the outside capitalist world on the enclosed nomadic society.

Even through his adolescent eyes, we can see the overly powerful allure money can have:

“Money, the colourful square pieces of paper, represented something valuable. I had noticed how carefully Father handled the pieces, and with how much respect Mother looked at them – I could even sense her desire at least once to hold them in her own hands. But Father did not let her have any, he never let them out of his hands.”

In Chapter three there is an argument amongst the older family members about the continuing need to herd animals in order to survive. At the suggestion that in this modern era “you no longer needed animals” the Father flares up and rages:

“Nonsense…I am somebody, too, and so are all the others, all the people who cling to the herds that have already fed our parents and our ancestors, and that will feed our children and children’s children for all eternity!”

To return to my point about speed and setting, the relatively slow and still pace of the novel reflects the pace of the lifestyle in the steppes which contrasts drastically with the sudden change of the modern world that is beginning to exert its pull even in these remote parts. The setting and the thematics work hand in hand to magnify the threat and show us what stands to be lost.

Tschinag often employs an earthy yet poetic prose, allowing the setting to supply the melody of his descriptions. It leads to delightful similes when he describes a piece of news flying “at the speed of a horse that is whipped non-stop” or his depiction of an injury he sustains and the scar it leaves “the dead skin looked like aspen bark”.

It furnishes the narrator with the conceptual frames he needs to make sense of life, he even thinks in terms of herds and shepherds “One thousand sheep – do you know how many that is? … That’s all the fingers of one hundred people taken together!”.

He clearly feels a great warmth for his homeland and often the novel feels like we are sat listening to a weary traveller at the end of a hard day lovingly recalling his youth and country:

“Most beautiful were the winter evenings. The stove would drone or hum, and the sound would travel and make the kettle resonate while the meat bubbled inside, and the smell would flow from the kettle and would, moment by moment, grow denser until it seemed to send out its tendrils and blend and become one with everything we could see in the flickering light. In these moments I believed I could sense life itself. The sensation was as corporeal and palpable as if I stood in a river and felt the prickling, cooling water on my skin.”

Given the harshness of the winter season in the steppes described by Tschinag, such simple yet intimate scenes of domesticity serve as much as a comfort and respite for the reader as they seem to for the inhabitants of the yurt. Central to the first half of The Blue Sky is the relationship between Tschinag and his grandmother, a woman who in keeping with the wilds of the steppes entered his life riding on horseback chased by a pack of dogs.

As tight-knit and enclosed a family as the nomads already are in their yurt, the grandson and grandparent form their own more intimate bond within this unit:

“We had each other, we were with each other, we lived for each other. We formed a small family within the larger one. All sorts of things happened in the large family, but in our small one, harmony reigned forever and the little sun of happiness kept shining… Grandma and I had our own space in the yurt.”

Slowing down to the pace that the mountains dictate is what allows us to witness this simple domesticity and play of family dynamics.

The tenderness and affection he bestows upon the beloved old woman are possibly my favourite features of the novel; yes, coming to terms with the inevitable ageing and passing of an elderly loved one is a universal and often used theme in literature, and, as a matter of disclosure, my own grandmother assumed the dominant mother role in my life, still, Tschinag’s depiction evokes intense emotions and heartache purely on its own merits.

A particularly beautiful passage was:

“Grandma was human silk. That’s what Father said, and what he said was always right. Always. And she had been sent to me by the sky. That’s what mother had revealed to me. Some of the things she said weren’t true of course, but when the sky was involved, we were not allowed to lie. Mother had said so herself and even Grandma had listened.”

We first see her at the start of the book being questioned by the narrator as to why she walks all the way out behind the hill to relieve herself instead of just squatting on the steppe like everyone else.

Her reply “Oh, I couldn’t do that, dear, I’m not used to squatting while people look – I could never do that!”at once brings home not just her aged vulnerability but also the character’s dignity and defiant will to do things on her own terms, the vulgar mundanity of the action coupled with the raw environment serve to weave together the comic and the tragic that will thread through the rest of the story.

Most touching, despite its grossness, is when after she loses her teeth our narrator chews her food for her. I already touched upon the way that scenery and season play a determining role in the lives and movements of the nomadic people and at times in The Blue Sky we see these natural forces personified in the figures of the imposing mountains themselves.

When his siblings have to go away to the big city our young narrator prays to the landscape to protect them “I begged the mountains, the steppe, and the sky to protect Brother and Sister from vicious and rabid dogs”.

But if the mountains and the heights are gods they are of the pagan sort, capable of harsh cruelty and far from benevolent; beings to be feared and cursed just as often as guardians to be pleaded to. We see the mother direct her fury to the clouds when a ewe escapes:

“Words came next – they poured out, one on top of the other, all aimed at the sky. It was as if Mother had grabbed the sky, as if she had grabbed this hard-hearted old father by his hair and was plucking away at him.”

Then later, after the novel’s most calamitous event:

“I prayed to the sky, which had turned reddish and brilliant. I prayed to the breezes that filled the sky and to the winds and the clouds which, though invisible, had to be there, at rest after finishing their work high above all living beings below. I prayed to the mountain saddle Ak Gertik, which was coming toward me, to all the saddles, hills, and peaks, and to all the hollows, valleys, and gorges beyond it, naming each in due order: Saryg Gertik,  Gertik, Hara Gertik, Dsher Haja, Myshyktalyyr, Gongaadaj, Dsher Aksy, Dshukschud…I prayed to the path I was treading, the path my forebears and their herds had already tread”.

As well as an insight into the beliefs and superstitions of these people it also marks the moment our young narrator truly experiences the twin cruelty and unfairness of the world, the indifference that had formerly provided the locus for transcendent epiphany now giving the youth his first experience of his powerlessness in the face of loss.

The landscape itself has undergone some of the most significant character development in the novel. The Blue Sky is a work equal parts tender, witty, sad, and vibrant. One that duly serenades the landscapes that gave birth to it and the tradition that raised it whilst retaining a wise self-awareness of its imperfections and limitations.

So far only a handful of Galsan Tschinag’s works have been translated to English, a situation which hopefully will be remedied in the coming years as The Blue Sky is as bold and fresh as the image its title conjures.

And What is Love, Exactly?

There might be a case for the argument that good stories, original allegories, real examples of human behaviour, are getting harder to come by. We are drowning in stories right now. We are beginning to tread uncomfortably familiar ground. And the most familiar ground of all is that of ordinary life experiences and relationships shoved under the microscope.

In Ponti, Sharlene Teo provides us with three ordinary lives; those of three ordinary women: the young horror movie actress Amisa in the late ‘70s, her own awkward and introverted daughter Szu in 2003, and Szu’s wiser friend Circe all grown up in 2020.

The originality in these ordinary stories comes at us through their honesty. In simple terms, the events of these three women’s lives could be summed up as teen drama, family strife, struggles in love – typical affairs. But there is a brutal honesty at play here, as the girls are exposed as failures in one way or another. They are introverts, unpopular at school, unsuccessful at work. To be as honest as Teo herself has been: they’re losers.

“The classroom is so sweltering that all thirty-three of us sweat out half our body weight, a form of suffering which the girls most committed to their eating disorders view as beneficial and beautifying. The cooked classroom smells like Impulse deodorant and sanitary pads.”

Ponti doesn’t glamorise. It doesn’t discuss hope, dedication, or volition. It shows us three people whose lives are a bit shit. I was reminded of the cast of Bob’s Burgers – a cartoon depicting a working-class family who own a burger restaurant in a quiet US town. Each member of Bob’s family is clever or artistic in their own way, but they’re a bit shit at life.

Not talented enough to be rich or famous, but full of heart and character nonetheless. Amisa, Szu, and Circe are the same way: they are people doing the best they can with the hand they’ve been dealt. And for their actions, in which they either succeed or they fail, we come to love them.

Read More: Books to Read if you Loved Normal People

The three stories are told out of order, as we bounce through time from ‘70s to 2003 to 2020. Amisa grew up unhappy and is given the chance to star in a campy B-movie about a ghost of folklore: the Pontianak.

Szu lives with her failed actress mother and her manipulative con-artist of an aunt and forms a sisterly bond with schoolmate Circe. Circe, in 2020, has a tapeworm, has gone through a divorce, and her company has been tasked with the promotion of a reboot of the film that made Szu’s mother famous: the titular Ponti. These women are weird enough to be both lovable and pitiable in equal measure.

Love is a Bit Toxic, Sometimes

A repeated motif in this novel is that of transparency and exposure. Szu’s mother and aunt Yunxi work as clairvoyant mediums who are visited by people looking for comfort.

They – Yunxi especially – claim to be able to see into the souls of people to see what darkens their minds. There are other moments scattered across the pages of moments where characters feel as though they can see each other’s thoughts or feel exposed to the prying eyes and minds of others. Secrecy, and the denial of secrecy, plague the thoughts of these pitifully vulnerable people, lost in love as they are.

“As I smooth overpriced night cream on my face, I marvel at the irony of it: how I left one HDB flat and a marriage to move into a more impersonal, rootless dwelling … only to have the same thing happen. Tense, arid evenings, a stalemate of two, a man telling me to be kinder, better, to try harder; giving me advice I don’t want to hear, instructions.”

As they struggle with their secrets, their desires, and their failures, these girls have to contend with jealousy.

That infamous phrase (which I have always found to be uncomfortably true) that goes ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’ sums up much of the rhythm of these girls’ stories. Circe’s family are rich and comfortable, a life which Szu, of course, covets. Szu’s mother, on the other hand, is an enigmatic and charming obsession for the teenage Circe, who comes to gravitate towards Amisa.

Their jealousies are nothing strange, especially for teenage girls, but rarely do we see such feelings and behaviours worn so blatantly on the sleeves of our characters. Once again, honesty in Ponti is queen. The narrative choice to interweave these stories is not only bold but incredibly difficult to pull off. Teo must have plotted this out for months upon months to achieve a narrative which jumps through time but still flows as one.

We learn more and more about Amisa through both her past and her future, all the while having her ultimate fate withheld from us. We see where Circe ends up, estranged from Szu, and are led along by the missing question of why for the entire novel. Teo keeps her secrets just as her characters keep theirs, and it is commendable to say the least.

Read More: If you enjoyed this you’ll love our review of Starling Days

Conclusion

Here is a raw, uncensored look into the lives of three losers. All women, written with honesty and affection. They are lovable in their corrupted but simple behaviours. They have guilty thoughts, suffer through jealousy, selfishness, and bad luck.

They’re far more shit than the women we typically see in works by Teo’s contemporaries, and that is to be unquestionably celebrated. There is no romance here, only life. Real, raw, uncomfortable life.

If you like this then you might like other books about and set in Southeast Asia or other books from Singapore chosen by Sharlene Teo herself.

Some of the biggest names in poetry, prose, and essays all hail from Indonesia, and if you want to keep up-to-date with some of that wonderful literature from far-off shores in 2019, here are five very special Indonesian writers to get you started.

Intan Paramaditha

The delightful Intan Paramaditha made waves in the world of translated literature in 2018 with her short story collection, Apple & Knife (translated by Stephen J Epstein). This is a bounty of tales inspired by folk myths from around the world, and horror fiction, all with a feminist bent and something very much worth saying about the discussion around femininity, masculinity, sex, and gender.

Intan states that she writes about ‘disobedient women’ and this is definitely the best way to describe these often vicious tales.

In incredibly exciting news, her next work being released in the UK in 2020 ‘The Wandering’ is a choose-your-own-adventure novel focusing on travel and the feeling of displacement. Intan Paramaditha is a powerhouse of imagination with a fiery feminist spirit. She should be read the world over.

Read our review of Apple & Knife here.

Norman Erikson Pasaribu

It may be unprofessional to say so, but Norman is first and foremost an absolute sweetheart. He is an impassioned poet, a jolly and enthusiastic speaker, and a true gift to the world of Indonesian poetry.

As a queer Catholic poet born and raised in Jakarta but with roots in the Batak community of Sumatra, his words come from a very unique place. All the more reason to read his newly translated collection of poems Sergius Seeks Bacchus (published by Tilted Axis Press in the UK and translated by the equally lovely Tiffany Tsao).

His work not only demonstrates this background of personal and political strife but shows us, above all, that his words come from a place of love and the desire for the freedom to love.

You can read our review of Sergius Seeks Bacchus here.

Dee Lestari

Lestari has accolades upon accolades under her belt, all a testament to her imagination and skill as an artist. I say artist because, beyond being a writer – and two-time winner of Indonesia’s Book of the Year Award – she is also an accomplished singer and songwriter, having four albums of her own and composing songs for other singers in Indonesia.

She deserves as many awards for her writing in translation as she has received in her native land, and we are sure she will get them. Her novel, Paper Boats, was released in 2017, translated by Tiffany Tsao.

Read More: If you’re visiting Bali, check out this helpful guide to Canggu.

Laksmi Pamuntjak

One of the great success stories of Indonesian literature and culture writing, Pamuntjak is an astonishing visionary whose writing has been published in journals and newspapers across the world, including the UK’s The Guardian.

Currently residing in Berlin, she is enjoying greater and greater success in the West for her powerful writing and penetrating critical voice. Her newest novel, The Birdwoman’s Palate, made use of her fantastic skill as a food writer to craft a culinary adventure.

Reda Gaudiamo

Formerly the chief editor of Cosmopolitan Indonesia, Gaudiamo’s first book to be translated into English – The Adventures of Na Willa – will be released in May 2019 by Emma Press. The book is a collection of illustrated stories about a young girl of mixed race growing up “unafraid to ask the big questions”. All signs point to Gaudiamo’s book being a big hit in the English-speaking world.

As an artist, she also previously performed as part of a duo, creating spectacular musical interpretations of poetry. Gaudiano is a unique and vibrant voice in Indonesian art, literature, and culture.

If you liked this collection then you might like:

Five Female East Asian Writers to Move Your Heart and Mind

Five Novels to Read Before Traveling to Southeast Asia

Five Asian Translated Graphic Novels We Love

There are so many ways to connect to a new country and learn to feel at home in unexpected places. Integration is, of course, key. For you, that may mean trying the local food, engaging with small businesses and shopping at authentic markets. It might mean homestays and village tours or museums and galleries.

It means all this for me, but perhaps most importantly, it means reading. Connecting with a new place via literature has become my new-found passion (‘passion’, ‘obsession’, whatever you want to call it.)

My most recent travels have taken me on a journey through Southeast Asia. Beginning in the utopian metropolis of Singapore, I have since explored parts of Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Cambodia, and I have no intentions of stopping yet.

Each country has had a different thing to offer. Culturally, historically and geographically the journey so far has been diverse and, at some points, simply overwhelming. One constant throughout, however, is that I’ve obsessively had my nose in a book (I have looked around a bit too though, I promise!)

Read More: 10 Books to Read Before you Visit Myanmar

Why these books?

The books I’ve chosen so far have helped me learn about each place on a new level. Something about a gripping narrative, with real and relatable characters rather than the facts and figures found in museums, helps me reach an understanding of a place that I’d probably be otherwise oblivious to.

Being a feminist, I have made a conscious effort to try and engage with often lesser-known female authors, or those from a diverse background. It is perhaps no surprise to reveal that I was repeatedly stuck for choice over which novel to choose.

Having studied a predominantly white curriculum, sometimes it feels like you have to go out of your way to discover authors from across the globe. Once you start looking, however, you’ll soon realise that there are so many gems to read- your backpack won’t be able to handle the strain.

Here is a summary of the books I’ve read on my journey through Southeast Asia and how they’ve each changed the way I travel.

Singapore – Ponti by Sharlene Teo

A story told through generations, Ponti by Sharlene Teo helped me imagine Singapore as more than just a hugely modernised city. This book took me back in time and told the story of a young girl entering this metropolis from a small village and the expectations that came with the sprawling city.

Through depicting three generations’ worth of life in Singapore it showed the dynamic change the city had undergone. It also taught me to expect humidity. A lot of humidity.

Related: Short Guide to Traveling in Singapore

Indonesia – Saman by Ayu Utami

The main lessons from Ayu Utami’s novel Saman revolved around the treatment of women in Indonesia and learning about their perspectives.

The novel defies traditional expectations and presents a story through the eyes of four sexually liberated female friends. Written in 1998, the novel challenged taboos that most Indonesian writers abided by, including writing openly about sex and the loss of religion. It also takes you on a vivid journey throughout Java and Bali (coincidentally, the very route I took while reading it).

Related: Read more Indonesian Literature – Man Tiger and Apple and Knife.

Philippines: Fish-Hair Woman by Merlinda Bobis

Read More: Books by Filipino Women Writers

Set in the Filipino village of Iraya, Fish-Hair Woman gives a vital insight into history as well as presenting an eclectic narrative in which fact and fiction blur into one another. For me, it provided vital historical information about the Philippines’ war which saw the government battle the communist insurgency, and the extreme hardships that bled into everyday life.

Featuring a white Australian character who goes missing during the conflict, Bobis’ novel also raises themes of the ‘White Saviour Complex’ and the uncomfortable prioritising of white people, even in the midst of a war that is not their own.

Related: Exploring Bohol and Panglao Island, Experience a Natural Paradise in Coron.

Vietnam: The Sacred Willow by Duong Van Mai Elliott

The Sacred Willow by Duong Van Mai Elliot was a longer read and one which stayed loyal to historical fact rather than fiction. As the true story is told through family narratives, however, it entertains and informs as if you are reading a string of short stories rather than a historical text.

The Sacred Willow taught me a lot about Vietnamese history, especially that of the 20th century. From the French occupation to the Vietnam war, the history was presented through the eyes of the author’s own family members, rendering any reader intimate with Vietnamese history and its emotional impact on the individual.

Related: Guide to Enjoying Hanoi like a Local, Guide to local Vietnamese Food and Drink

Cambodia – First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung

Much like The Sacred Willow, Luong Ung’s First They Killed My Father does a profound job of engaging with unimaginable brutalities through individual characters. I read this book while in Phnom Penh and it added so much emphasis to the already harrowing trips to the Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.

As real as these histories are, you sometimes need an individual to relate to, or a certain family’s story to engage with, to realise the true devastation caused

 Related: Exploring Cambodia with Jon Swain’s River of Time

Conclusion

Whether it allows you to engage better with landscapes, understand histories, or simply inspire you to travel to places you hadn’t yet considered – like Southeast Asia – opening a book while on the move opens endless possibilities. With this in mind, I plan to carry on moving, exploring each new place and all its hidden secrets, one chapter at a time.

You can follow Deliah on Instagram.

At Books and Bao, we fervently encourage travellers and explorers to discover a country through its books before heading out, so make sure to check out all of the above books, and more if you can, before backpacking southeast Asia.

If you enjoying discovering the books to read before backpacking Southeast Asia, you might also like Five Books to Read Before Traveling to China or 5 East Asian Writers to Move your Heart and Mind.

Whilst hardly what you’d call a safe haven, Colombia has nevertheless made massive strides towards stability and security.

Early on in my trip, and on one of my last nights in Bogota, I met up with a couchsurfer I’d been hanging out with during my first week in Colombia, along with some friends that she’d introduced me to.

One of these friends was a fellow Brit who, as it turned out was in the same hostel as me. We went to a restaurant in ‘La Candelaria’, the old colonial centre of Bogota, home to its main governmental building and also where a good chunk of the city’s hostels and hotels are located.

At some point during dinner, the talk had turned to politics (this was a year after the Brexit referendum and still early on in Trump’s presidency).

At this point, the Brit (his name was something like Tarquin or Quentin; we’ll settle with Quentin) piped up saying that there’s no point in voting because it doesn’t change anything and you should just, you know, focus on being a good person every day.

He even went so far as to recite that catchphrase of the ‘free’ thinker turned apathetic: “If voting really made a difference they wouldn’t let you do it.”

I’m certainly not saying that you should need to take a degree course in the politics and history of any country that you plan to visit, but surely if you plan to spend close to a year somewhere (as Quentin had) that is so well known for its bloodshed and political violence, it seems staggeringly thoughtless to not have done even the most cursory of readings about your destination.

(As a side note for anyone planning on visiting Colombia, Tom Feiling’s Short Walks From Bogota and Michael Jacobs’ The Robber Of Memories are both excellent places to start).

Reliving Cambodia’s History

Cambodia is, after all, a country where, in the last century, babies were literally cut out of wombs because their mothers belonged to the wrong side of the political spectrum. Also, in living memory, governmental buildings just around the corner from where we sat had been invaded by militants, the occupants gunned down and eventually blown up.

As much as knowledge of a country’s wounds and troubles can save you from making a Quentinesque fool of yourself, it also serves a more positive function to the traveller, allowing you a lens through which to more clearly see and appreciate the goodness that is present, a perspective by which one can more appropriately value the beauty through which you are lucky enough to wander.

It’s this idea of awareness of a country’s trauma that brings me to write this essay.

“A host of memories passed before my eyes: soldiers rotting at the wayside; the white knuckles of a woman’s hand clenching the child torn from her grasp; burial pits of skulls polished like billiard balls; pitiful fragments of bodies carried from the battlefields; the corruption, the incompetence, the intrigue, the dust, the soldiers, the refugees, the war without end. Cambodia at its worst was truly ugly.”

Probably best known as the inspiration for Roland Joffé’s 1984 film, Jon Swain’s River Of Time combines memoir, journalism and, in an odd way, travel writing; to detail the author’s time spent as a foreign correspondent during the wars in Cambodia and Vietnam as well as the years immediately following the conflicts.

Although Swain uses the Mekong river alluded to in the title as a focal point, the pages take us to Laos, Thailand, the Philippines and even as far as Ethiopia, London and Paris.

There is a teeming abundance of writing about these conflicts, especially Vietnam, but what makes River Of Time so necessary and worth reading is the absolute sense of appropriateness and care with which Swain presents and engages with his subject.

His affection and admiration for the people of Indochina are clear and worn quite visibly on his sleeve throughout, yet despite his personal involvement, Swain knows how to keep a hard journalistic head; and it’s the intertwining of the deeply personal with the more concrete and objective that give the work much of its force.

The two threads keep one another in check lest the account fall prey to excessive romanticism or an overly cold detachment.

This is vital given how prone many people are to dissolving this period of history into crude Manichean dichotomies of brave Western liberators vs murderous savages, or equally inaccurate Colonial Imperialists vs noble freedom fighters.

Swain pulls no punches when dealing with either side and has as much disdain for the smiling delusional Western apologists for Communism as he does the murderous soldiers and leaders of the regimes.

Swain spent a tense couple of weeks trapped in the French embassy during the fall of Phnom Penh, along with a crowd of others including fellow journalists, aid workers, military officers, and a host of high-ranking Cambodian government officials as well as the various Cambodian workers and relatives of those based at the embassy.

As food began to dwindle, and hygiene and moral deteriorated, he had to watch in despair as the Cambodians inside the embassy were gradually extracted and taken away by the Khmer Rouge.

Although in an uncertain and precarious situation himself, he reflects on the guilt he experienced knowing that his status as a European afforded him at least some protection whilst day after day he had to watch as guerrillas came to the gates to drag away the Cambodians inside, powerless as the time passed by and even the highest ranking officials lost any protective power afforded to them by their positions.

Furthermore, over the course of the book we see just how exacting a calling journalism can be as Swain is driven by an almost self-destructive urge to throw himself into the midst of catastrophe after catastrophe all in pursuit of the story and he does not shy from showing the toll that such an occupation can take.

“I fell into the fatal trap of many foreign correspondents – not knowing how to turn down an assignment. The desire to cover stories is sometimes irresistibly powerful; this ruthlessness for ‘getting the story’ over and above all else, including love, has wrecked the personal lives of many colleagues; in my case, too, it was to have deep and lasting consequences.”

Every bit as harrowing as the reports of the atrocities occurring in the midst of the conflicts are the struggles faced in the aftermath of the wars. Swain details the travails of many of the fleeing Vietnamese refugees who would come to be known as the “boat people” on account of how they fled their country on sailing boats and crudely fashioned rafts.

Many would try escaping to nearby Thailand only to fall victim to groups of Thai pirates, former Thai fishermen who sunk to murderous lows and preyed on the vulnerable refugees.

Boats would be boarded, the men were thrown overboard or worse as the women and young girls were taken away to be made into sex slaves. It’s uncomfortable reading but necessary, and Swain treats it with the sort of delicacy and care such victims are due.

He has a novelist’s eye for how the right particulars can tell a much bigger story as we see when he shares the story of one such refugee, a young girl named Ngoc, who was fathered by a US soldier who subsequently abandoned her and her mother. Ngoc ends up separated from her mother and falls victim to a gang of pirates:

“In the cruel roulette of life Ngoc seemed to be an especially tragic loser. More than an innocent victim, she was a metaphor for America’s intervention in Vietnam, made for the best of motives but which brought about terrible death and destruction and in the end more tragedy than it can possibly have been worth. The Americans courted the south Vietnamese assiduously; they made them dependent, then abandoned them to their fate. That is precisely what happened to Ngoc’s mother; her GI boyfriend made her pregnant, then one day – like America – he jilted her and went away.”

Swain respectfully and sympathetically tells the stories of such victims as Ngoc because he rightly appreciates the duty owed to history and how his position can lend strength to their tired voices carrying them to ears they might not otherwise have reached. But he also knows when to let the victims tell their stories themselves like in the case of another refugee called Hai.

Hai was part of a boatload of refugees who opted to set sail for The Philippines; they became hopelessly adrift and although at one point in their ordeal they are met by a US Navy submarine it heartbreakingly passes them by leaving them to their fate.

As the boat’s supplies were exhausted the occupants resorted to desperate and horrifying measures to survive and hearing Hai’s own first-person account of the ordeal delivered in his simple matter of fact language gives the telling an impact that may have been lost to sensationalism had it been written in a more literary second hand. It’s certainly the section of the book that had the biggest effect on me and brought me close to tears.

“As I got up to go, I looked into Hai’s eyes. They were black pools of horror. The eyes of the dead. This man too had eyes I cannot forget. The eyes of Vietnam.”

Lest we become too despairing in the face of such horror, Swain’s work also serves to memorialise the humanity and goodness that refuse to die even in the midst of the terror and savagery of war and tyranny.

He lets us be privy to the romance and love that blossom between himself and a French-Vietnamese woman named Jacqueline; the story of their relationship spread over these years of conflict is replete with its own moments of fear, bursts of hope and joy, and aching sadness.

Swain’s Heroes

Swain’s story has its heroes like the French anthropologist François Bizot; the only Westerner to have survived captivity at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, Theodre Schweitzer; an American UN field officer at Songkhla refugee camp who is estimated to have saved the lives of 1500 Vietnamese refugees; and of course, Dith Pran, the Cambodian photojournalist and interpreter whose remarkable story is told in The Killing Fields.

Detailing his personal relationship to these brave people is not an act of self-aggrandisement but rather a way of making them all the more real, seeing them as people who existed in a meaningful way to Swain who over the course of the book we have come to feel some kind of acquaintance with bestows on them a concreteness that may otherwise have been lost if they were kept at more of a distance in the narrative.

Vietnam may not be fully recovered or in the clear; even to a healthy body there are always threats and Vietnam’s future is a path littered with pitfalls, China’s trade war with the US is going to send ripples throughout the region, and perhaps more pressingly, if something is not done about the impending environmental crisis Vietnam is at a particular risk of devastation due to rising sea levels with many of its key industrial areas most vulnerable.

That said, given the severity of the wounds sustained in the last century and the ongoing trauma Vietnam has suffered, to take a stroll through Hanoi today is to be met with an air of convalescence, on a Saturday night the streets of the Old Quarter are flooded with bodies clamouring to absorb the vitality of the night, little plastic stools and tables erupting onto the streets to accommodate the masses of revellers as the bars and clubs bombard the evening with bass lines.

Walking by Hoan Kiem lake in the early evening and the pedestrian zone is crammed with circles of young teenagers having dance-offs to bombastic hip-hop as the setting sun paints the waters a deep orange that turns the surface ripples into smiles beaming at the youthful exuberance.

For Vietnam, however tenuous its condition might be, today is a good day. I’m far too young to be able to say look how far you’ve come, but after reading Swain I can at least begin to have a sense of appreciation for how significant this joy and freedom must be.

If you enjoyed this article you might enjoy: Man Tiger: Fiction That Brings Us Back to the World