“Beyond Mount Kailash” by Mitya New
Mitya New’s earlier career as a foreign correspondent in Hong Kong, China, and Europe and his present position at universities in Hong Kong and India were evidently good preparation for his debut novel, Beyond Mount Kailash, an engaging story of a cross-cultural marriage that takes a different path from the typical Asian expat story.
Maria is a young German woman who grew up on a small island off the country’s northern coast. Her grandparents on both sides were either Nazis or supporters; it’s a history that Maria’s parents would prefer to forget. Maria has never felt comfortable in her parents’ strict household. As the story opens, Maria is in Varanasi, India and seems to be in a state of crisis, the reasons become apparent as the story first backtracks to Maria’s move to Hong Kong in her twenties to work in the textile industry.
Although her time in Hong Kong is never explicitly dated, it’s easy to place it well before the Handover in 1997. Maria flies into the venerable Kai Tak and peers into people’s flats as her plane lands. Although things go well at first, she soon feels burned out, but meets her future husband, Mischa at a party on the roof of a Kowloon walk-up. Soon thereafter Maria notices that Mischa is reading Leon Uris’s Exodus. She asks if he’s Jewish and he replies that (like the author himself) his mother is and his father is British.
Mischa grew up in Hong Kong and takes Maria to his favorite places, including a rooftop in the Kowloon Walled City to view planes landing at Kai Tak, a different view from when Maria landed in Hong Kong. New’s writing is especially vivid when he describes places in Hong Kong.
As they ascended, Maria saw huge machines behind grilled gates on several floors, some of them idle, others ear-shatteringly loud, vibrating so violently they seemed to shake the building to its foundations as they produced what looked like thousands of plastic red flowers.
When the couple decides to marry, Maria’s mother insists they wed in Germany. Mischa’s parents fly in from Hong Kong and during the reception his father makes a toast.
“Is it not remarkable that we can stand here today,” he continued in a firm clear voice, “both Jew and German, to celebrate a wedding where only a few years ago our parents were opposing, persecuting and liquidating each other?”
The room is silent; Maria had neglected to tell her parents that Mischa is Jewish. Mischa withdraws until the couple is back in Hong Kong. Pregnancy eludes them and when Mischa has an opportunity to work in Mumbai, he and Maria believe it will give them a fresh start. In India they decide to adopt.
It will perhaps come as no surprise that Maria’s parents are unhappy their grandchild will not look like them. Maria goes through much soul searching and it’s at this point that the story meets up with the first chapter set in Varanasi. As the title of the novel infers, Maria takes a trip to Mount Kailash in Tibet. Even before she makes this trip to clear her mind from the conflict with her parents, she learns a valuable lesson from a guru in India, a lesson that is at the heart of the book:
