Category Archives: Asia

Evelyn in Transit, by David Guterson**

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Maybe we should call it the Harper Lee syndrome; you write one absolutely amazing novel. It becomes iconic, and then, nothing else ever works again. I hope that’s not what has happened to David Guterson, the author of Snow Falling on Cedars. For whatever reason, his new book, Evelyn in Transit, is a complete wash for me.

My thanks go to W.W. Norton, RB Media, and NetGalley for the review copies. This book is for sale now.

We have two protagonists, Evelyn and Tsering. Evelyn is a curious and somewhat oppositional child in Indiana; Tsering is in Tibet. We see their separate stories in the beginning, but the transitions are abrupt and I cannot find any emotional connection with either of them. Ultimately, they are connected within the story when a group of lamas (people, not llamas) turn up on the now-grown Evelyn’s porch to tell her that her kindergartener is the reincarnation of the Dali lama that has recently died.

The promotional blurb tells us that the story is written in “a spare, precise style of extraordinary beauty, full of surprising humor and luminosity.” I’ll vouch for the “spare” part; I think of it as a “see Spot run” style, reminiscent of early grade school reading texts. The humor and luminosity, however, have eluded me.

 It might have helped to have more of an internal monologue, particularly for Evelyn; she did and said so many things that were surprising and inappropriate, and if I had a better handle on her motivation, she might have seemed more like a seeker and less like an antisocial outlier. Tsering was even worse.

I had access to both the audio and digital review copies; the reader did a competent job, but couldn’t save the narrative. I don’t think anyone could have. I can’t recommend it.

Bad Asians, by Lillian Li**-***

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Lillian Li is the author of Number One Chinese Restaurant (2018), a tale of sibling rivalry and complex family issues that was in turns suspenseful and hilarious. It was, and remains, one of my all-time favorites from 14 years of reviewing, and because of it, I have followed Li on every possible site, waiting to pounce whenever her next novel became available. And perhaps this oversized expectation has fed into my disappointment this time around. Bad Asians is not a dreadful book, but it’s not close to being on par with that first magnificent novel.

My thanks go to NetGalley and Henry Holt for the invitation to read and review. This book will be available to the public February 17, 2026.

Bad Asians tells the story of four young Chinese-Americans who finish college, yet find the American dream they’ve been expecting is still nowhere in sight. Then an old classmate named Grace returns to the neighborhood. Grace had the keys to the kingdom growing up; she had the fanciest house by far, the nicest clothes, and was a source of awe for all of them. Grace seemed to have it made. Now she’s back, and she wants to feature the four of them in her documentary. They agree, albeit without great expectations; the movie will most likely never see the light of day, they figure. Instead, it goes viral on a streaming platform, and it shows all of them as caricatures of their worst selves. They are recognized on the street; they are mocked.

Grace, meanwhile, is in dire financial straits herself; she appeared to have it made, yet that was an illusion.

For some reason, the narrative doesn’t flow as cleanly as Li’s last one, and the frequent changes of setting, both in time and place, are a fair amount of work to follow. I had access to both the digital and audio versions, and whereas the narrator does a decent job, I find myself wondering whether I would have been more successful in keeping track of the story’s many moving parts if I had stuck to the digital version alone. Had I been excited about its potential, I might have backtracked and tried reading it again, but I wasn’t and didn’t—although I did reread small portions of it.

I am probably not within the targeted demographic, since I am not young and not Asian; yet one feature grates on my sensibilities throughout it, and that is the treatment of “Asian-American” and “Chinese-American” as synonyms. It’s true that all of the protagonists are of Chinese origin, but at some point, I would like to have seen recognition that there are other Asian-Americans. Yes, all Chinese-Americans are Asian-Americans, but the reverse is not true, and though I’ve tried to set it aside, I can’t get past the apparent assumption that Americans of Filipino, Japanese, Korean, or Pacific Island heritage—not to even mention many more that hail from other regions of Asia– are irrelevant.

I can’t recommend this novel to you, although I will still happily read Li’s next book. She did it once, and I believe that she can do it again, but this isn’t it.

My Documents, by Kevin Nguyen***-****

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3.5 stars, rounded upwards.

My Documents is the sophomore novel of author Kevin Nguyen. This story reimagines the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II, asking instead, what if it was happening now, and what if those imprisoned were of Vietnamese descent?

My thanks go to Random House and NetGalley for the invitation to read and review. This book is available to the public now.

Our protagonists are four young people, all of whom are cousins with the same last name as the author. Ursula is an ambitious journalist living in Manhattan; Jen attends New York University, partly because she hopes to connect more often with Ursula. Alvin is an engineering intern at Google; Duncan is still in high school. When the internment comes, Ursula and Alvin are spared, but Jen and Duncan are forced into a concentration camp.

This book is imaginative, and I liked the characters. We see how the internment affects those that are imprisoned, but also how their internment affects Ursula and Alvin on the outside; ultimately, of course, the family’s dynamics are altered forever.

The humor that is highlighted in the synopsis failed to materialize for me. There was the odd chuckle or two, but no more than I would expect to find in any novel.  This is pretty common. However, I found myself feeling a bit cheated at the end, because there was so much more that could have been done here. I felt as if a real statement could have been made, but the opportunity was squandered.

Nevertheless, I see Nguyen as a promising author, and one whose work I will continue to follow.

The True Happiness Company, by Veena Dinavahi****-*****

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4.5 stars, rounded upwards. Veena Dinavahi’s experience as a member of a cult called The True Happiness Company is so outrageous that if it were written about as fiction, it would be universally panned as ridiculous and unbelievable. But it isn’t fiction; it’s what happened to her. My thanks go to Random House and NetGalley for the invitation to read and review. This book is available to the public now.

Veena’s parents are immigrants from India who gave everything that they had in order to provide their children with the best opportunities possible. Between their sacrifices and Veena’s high I.Q., she was admitted to a coveted, highly competitive school that also had a horrifyingly high rate of suicides and suicide attempts due to the intense pressure under which its students labored. When Veena became suicidal, her parents turned to professionals for guidance, but one of the so-called professionals they consulted, the most persuasive and charismatic of them all, was a charlatan. With their life savings neatly stashed in his own bank account, this man, who claimed to be a psychologist but was not, diagnosed Veena as having a borderline personality; once she accepted the diagnosis, “Bob” used it to undermine her instincts of self-protection and what seemed to her to be common sense. She couldn’t be trusted to decide anything for herself, because she was crazy. And thus was this young woman brought under the spell of an insidious conman and sexual predator, one who also used her parents’ unfamiliarity with American culture to gain their acceptance of the things to which their daughter was subjected.

Before she knew it, Veena was married to a young man she didn’t know very well, but who was also susceptible to the charms of this snake oil salesman. She married him because the doctor said to; once this was done, Bob became the third element in their marriage. Both of them spoke to him in person or by phone daily, or even multiple times a day. He resolved every dispute, and he forbade them to resolve anything without involving him first. It is a miracle that Veena was able to find the support and resolve she needed in order to extricate herself and her children from the dungeon of despair he created.

I am quite late with this review; the book came out in May, but it is a harsh read, and I took my time with it. Were it fiction, Veena could have inserted moments of levity or joy to relieve the horror, but it isn’t, and there were none. I would have liked for her to break up some of the roughest bits by flashing forward to bits of her life as it is now, but then, it’s not my story to tell. I’m just glad she and her children are safe, and that she can rebuild her life.

Those that enjoy true crime will be interested in this memoir. Highly recommended to those that have interest in cult stories, and that will willingly endure a rough read.

The Dilemmas of Working Women, by Fumio Yamamoto**

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I haven’t been this disappointed in a book in quite some time. The Dilemmas of Working Women is Fumio Yamamoto’s collection of five stories about women that work (or that should but don’t,) and it is immensely successful and highly regarded in her native Japan. As I read, I kept looking for the greatness, a bit like scrounging for coins lost under sofa cushions, but it has completely eluded me, and my rating and review can only be based on my own experience and reaction.

I thank NetGalley, Blackstone Audio, and HarperCollins for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

As suggested in the title, each of the five stories focuses on a woman that has a problem. None of them makes a serious effort to do one damn thing about it. Lazy, neurotic, or…? Who can say. I sure can’t. One might expect a book that’s written by a woman and that has exclusively female protagonists to have a little feminist swagger, but this feels like the opposite. I found it hard to root for any of them, because they were all so useless.

When I took the galley, I expected there to be some humor. Look at the cover! It’s been years since I was taken in by a hilarious book cover that masked a crummy read, and I won’t do it again anytime soon.

I was given access to both the digital galley and the audio. The reader, Yuriri Naka, does as good a job as possible with this collection.

Not recommended.

This American Woman, by Zarna Garg*****

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Zarna Garg is an immigrant, born and raised in India. She was rich, except for when she was poor; more on that in a minute. Ultimately, she came here for the same reason many people do: she had to make a break for it.

My thanks go to Random House and NetGalley for the invitation to read and review. This book is available to the public now.

Garg works now as a stand up comic, but she has done many things, and worn many hats. First, of course, she was a runaway bride, more or less, bailing from India before her very wealthy father could marry her off as part of a business arrangement.

“If I hadn’t done that, right now I would be a Mumbai grandma in an arranged marriage to a much older, boring industrialist. I would be draped in brocade silk saris, but I would have a giant padlock on my big mouth.”

Garg’s immigration—fast and sneaky, which was the only possible way–was made easier by her older sister, who was already living in Ohio. Since then, Garg has finished law school and passed the bar, married another Indian immigrant, had three children, and done a number of other impressive things, but it was her own daughter that asked her mother whether she’d ever considered a career in comedy. It takes someone that’s mentally tough to succeed in that realm, but the streets of Mumbai, where she’d lived hand-to-mouth for two years as a runaway teen following her mother’s death, prepared her well, so she was ready for the gritty world she was entering. She explains,   

            “…I had played a show at a club on the Upper East Side and a cockroach fell on my head. The night before that, as I walked to the stage I had to step over a communal puddle of throw up from a bachelorette part who refused to leave. They just kept throwing up and laughing. So far my comedy career had been physically revolting—but it was still my dream! Now here I was in my very first New York City green room that smelled like air…I walked out on stage. Two thousand white ladies politely applauded. Oh my god. What was I doing? Would this audience even understand my humor? For them India is incense and chanting. Were they ready for a foul-mouthed real-life Indian auntie who hated meditation? “

I wondered, after watching some of Garg’s stand up work online, whether the book would be a duplication of her routine, more or less; it’s happened with other comic authors. But although there’s a small smattering of shared content, the memoir is mostly unique, and I never had the sense that I’d already seen this before.

Garg is funny enough that I’ve let her speak for herself here. Anyone that needs to laugh hard, and that enjoys reading about the disorientation and culture shock experienced by those new to America should read this book. Highly recommended!  

The Family Recipe, by Carolyn Huynh*****

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“We all need to feel needed. Otherwise, what’s the point of living?”

Carolyn Huynh made her authorial debut in 2022 with The Fortunes of Jaded Women. It was one of my favorite novels not only of that year, but of all the thousand-plus galleys I have read since I began reviewing. She’s back again with The Family Recipe, and it’s every bit as good as the first. My thanks go to NetGalley and Atria Books for the invitation to read and review, but make no mistake: I would have hunted this thing down and bought it with my Social Security check if it came down to it. I wouldn’t have been sorry, either.

This book is available to the public now.

Once again, our protagonists are Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Americans, mostly women, and once again, they are siblings and other family members that must come together; it isn’t a voluntary reunion. And that’s where the similarities between the first book and this one end.

Duc Tran, the patriarch, has laid out the terms by which his children may inherit his fortune. Once upon a time, he was the Vietnamese sandwich king, and in order to become his heir, each of his four daughters must relocate to a city she doesn’t want to live in, and revive a down-at-the-heels restaurant in a now undesirable end of town. It’s a contest; that is, unless Duc’s one son, Jude, succeeds in getting married within the one year’s time limit of the contest. If he can do that, he wins. (His sisters aren’t worried; who would marry Jude?)

The story is told from several points of view; these include the siblings, their uncle—a shady lawyer, and Duc’s best friend; their mother, who abandoned them when they were small, when her mental health collapsed, and never went back; Duc’s second wife; and briefly, Duc himself, who mostly serves as a mysterious figure that doesn’t even return to the States to lay out his children’s requirements, sending their uncle as his proxy.  As the story unfolds, we learn more about each sibling, and about the traumas they have experienced, as well as their successes.

The thing that makes it work so well is Huynh’s unerring sense of timing. It’s a dramatic tale, but it’s shot full of humor, as we see at the outset, when we learn the sisters’ names. Their father was a huge fan of the Beatles, and so the girls are named Jane, Paulina, Georgia, and (wait for it…) Bingo!

There are plenty of twists and turns, and the dialogue crackles. The internal monologues are mesmerizing. This book would make a fantastic movie.

Since I was reading this galley digitally, I highlighted quotes that I thought I’d like to use in this review, but there are 28 of them. Obviously, I cannot share them all here, but let that inform you, if nothing else here has, how much I love this book.

Highly recommended to anyone that has a beating heart, at least a passing interest in Vietnamese-American culture and/or family stories, and can use a few good laughs.

You’ll Never Believe Me, by Kari Ferrell**-***

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My thanks go to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the invitation to read and review. This book will be available to the public January 7, 2025.

The blurb for this book had me at hello. Korean baby girl adopted by Caucasian Americans, who then become Mormons; a childhood and adolescence rife with alienation, discrimination, and ultimately a life of crime; prison time, followed by social crusades, among them prison reform, which is hugely necessary. I was all in, but that was before I read this thing. My own daughter is half Japanese and has to listen to “Where you from?” a fair amount, so this is a sensitive area for me, too. Racial teachings within the LDS (Mormon) church are a veritable minefield, and indeed, I can see how Ferrell’s upbringing would have been fraught.

And yet, the memoir that I read was not what I expected. The memoir, the blurb said, would be laugh out loud funny; I chucked a few times at the outset, and then was mostly just horrified. I received both the digital and audio galleys, and halfway through I abandoned the audio, because Ferrell, who provides her own narration, sounds so ebullient, so proud of herself, that I couldn’t take it. Reverting to the digital made it doable, but I found myself finishing it from a sense of obligation rather than a desire to read more.

Ferrell’s friends during her adolescence are what most adults would consider to be the wrong crowd. Truancy, petty theft, lying, drinking, and drugs are hallmarks. But Ferrell neither stays there as an adult, nor reforms herself once she reaches adulthood, though her parents, even though they divorce, likely can provide her with psychiatric treatment or counseling. Instead, she escalates, and commences stealing and defrauding her friends, pretending to need an abortion, pretending to have cancer, receiving so-called loans and gifts from those that don’t have a lot of money but love her dearly, and then disappearing. Steal in Utah, move to New York City. Steal in New York, go home to the folks in Arizona. And it continues until, at long last, she is arrested, tried, and convicted.

I tried to put my finger on what it is that makes me edgy here. Why do I not believe she’s all that sorry? Partly, it’s that other people appear only briefly and vaguely here. Of course it’s Ferrell’s life that’s the focus, but I would have expected some passages that flesh out the people that have loved her and tried to help her, even if it is necessary to conceal their identities as a matter of their own preferences. What happens to them later? What hardships, if any, do they suffer because of her actions? Instead, all of them come across as shadows, and as if they don’t really matter. I would have expected some emotion around reconnecting with some of these people, trying to make amends and financial restitution, even if they don’t want to see or hear from her. She talks a fair amount about the realization that her behavior is a form of self-sabotage, cutting herself off from positive relationships, but she doesn’t talk much about how she has sabotaged, or even completely blown up, the lives of others.

Lastly, I’m disturbed by some of her assumptions. The one that comes immediately to mind is when she reminds us—as if this is well known—that lying is fun. What??

In order for a memoir to be successful, the reader must be able to bond with the author. I have been unable to do that, either because Ferrell enjoys talking about her crimes and betrayals a little too much, or because she is unable to convey remorse in her writing; either way, I cannot recommend it to you.  

Emperor of the Seas, by Jack Weatherford*****

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How much do you know about the Mongol empires? If you grew up in the U.S., chances are you answered, “Absolutely nothing.” The world is a big place, and world history has never been much of a priority in American schools; we study various phases of U.S. history, state history, and in a wild flurry of internationalism, some districts now teach a semester of Canadian history. The single year of world history in high school is usually devoted to World War II, which is impossible to teach without including information about Europe, and a smidgen about Japan along with, yes, more American history. There you go. Here’s your diploma.

In my retirement years, I have reveled in the freedom to learn about the history that wasn’t on the syllabus for what I studied, and later, what I was hired to teach. Having marched my way through various other times and places, I realized that I knew nothing about the Mongol khans. I read one novel about Genghis, and I was hooked.

My thanks go to NetGalley and Bloomsbury for the review copy. You can buy this book now.

If you’re going to read a single nonfiction book about the Mongols, this would be a fine choice. Jack Weatherford’s research is outstanding, including works in several non-English languages that most of us couldn’t hope to read on our own. His scholarship is so meticulous that he has been awarded both of Mongolia’s top national awards. Not half bad, for a boy from South Carolina. And while this book is not written as narrative nonfiction, the tone is conversational, the language accessible. I read it daily at lunch time, and it wasn’t long before I was shouting out random, amazing facts to family members that dared venture into the kitchen.

It began with Genghis, a young man whose family was left homeless, left to freeze or starve when his father and protector died. With desperation, talent, and ruthlessness that he learned well, he turned it around, and as he grew up he vanquished his enemies, brought the most talented and trustworthy elements to himself, and let the devil take the rest. His instinct for military strategy was a thing of pure genius. But this book is mostly not about him; it’s about his grandson, Kublai Khan, who expanded the empire Genghis began until his domain stretched from Baghdad to the far shores of China.

Until Kublai arrived, Mongols were an inland people, but it was Kublai who realized that in order to expand and become a world power, he had to have ocean-going vessels and people that knew how to use them. The peoples of Southern China were tough to defeat, but once it was done, he was able to use their technologies in ways that were of immeasurable value.

The progression looked like this (in a very simplified version): Genghis conquered, and took no prisoners, with a few rare exceptions. Kublai conquered, but also used diplomacy, highlighting the potential benefits of becoming a Mongol subject; he didn’t routinely kill everyone he defeated. And under Kublai’s son Temur, the Mongols segued from physical battle to economic dominance, making China’s ports the ideal destination of merchants from all over the world.

One of the most interesting things I learned had to do with the authority that was vested in the women of the highest placed families. When the men rode off to conquer, it was women that looked after the business interests and saw to local governance. It worked out nicely; Europeans should have taken note.

I can’t compare this book to others because I haven’t read any others on this topic cover to cover, but I wouldn’t let that stop you. If the Mongols are persuaded that Weatherford has done the work and done it well, who can argue? I learned a great deal and enjoyed it, and so I highly recommend it to you.

The Chinese Question, by Mae M. Ngai****-*****

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Mae Ngai is an award-winning author and a professor at Columbia University. In her third book, The Chinese Question, she examines the race relations and to some degree, the economic underpinnings of the Chinese diaspora.

My thanks go to NetGalley and W.W. Norton and Company for the review copy. I am disgracefully late, but when I began reading this book I realized that if I were to absorb and retain anything here, I would need to take it in small bites. That said, this is an unusually well researched work, and it’s well worth the time and attention of anyone interested in the topic.

Usually when I see research having to do with Chinese immigration, it is within the context of immigration to the United States, or an examination of the push factors of emigration, examining why Chinese chose to leave their native land and embark upon an expensive, dangerous, and uncertain journey to a place they’d never visited—in most cases—and where they usually did not speak the language. Instead, Ngai examines it as a global diaspora that includes English speaking nations, namely South Africa, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and the United States. In doing so she is able to highlight the similarities of treatment, to put it politely, and also to dismantle some of the stereotypes that have rooted themselves in English speakers’ knowledge of history.

For starters, she wants us to know that Chinese immigrants were not necessarily “coolies” or indentured workers, and they didn’t always face conflicts with Caucasian powerbrokers. But there certainly were a great many blood chilling abuses, sometimes brought about by White fear of the “other,” but oftener from greed and the desire to exploit the Chinese working class and eliminate competition from the businesses of better off Chinese.

This study is adjacent to my own graduate study topic of many years ago, when I examined the “Model Minority,” and the attempt to counter the demands of U.S. Civil Rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s with the suggestion that Black people quietly accept abuse and quietly climb the economic ladder, or not, as Asians of Chinese and Japanese descent had supposedly done. Ngai demonstrates that Chinese immigrants weren’t all that quiet, and they weren’t all that accepting of maltreatment at the hands of employers and local officials. This is interesting material indeed, and I wish I had known these things sooner.

As a general read for a wide audience, this may be a four star book because it is dense and has an academic approach that not all pleasure readers will appreciate; however, for those with a strong interest in the topic, whether for academic research or personal knowledge and growth, it is hands down the best work I’ve seen in decades.

Highly recommended to those passionate about the issue.