In 1981, Japanese actress and television personality Tetsuko Kuroyanagi published a best-selling memoir, Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window, an engaging story set during her unusual primary school years that happened to take place during World War II. Her book sold 4.5 million copies in Japan in just its first year and has been translated into thirty languages, eleven from India alone. The book tells of Kuroyanagi’s rambunctious childhood that got her expelled from her first school, partly because she refused to sit at her desk and instead wanted to look out the window at the sparrows outside.
Memoir
Arundhati Roy’s much-awaited memoir, Mother Mary Comes To Me, tackles Roy’s writing career, India’s sweeping political instability, and most of all, a reckoning with an exhilarating character: her mother, Mary Roy. From Roy’s village, fictionalised even here as “Ayemenem”, to the chaotic urban sprawl of Delhi, the book covers Roy’s rocky childhood, her brief architectural foray, her sudden and dizzying literary stardom, and eventually, her settling into the role as one of India’s most beloved—and most widely politicised—writers.
Expat memoirs, even (or perhaps especially) of the East Asian variety, are a venerable genre. One suspects that even in the early days, what authors presented as new and exotic, probably wasn’t really. In these days of ubiquitous travel videos on YouTube, this is probably even more the case. As a result, such books need a good raconteur or prose stylist to pass muster. Fortunately, Connla Stokes is both.
Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) was an Egyptian novelist, short-story writer and screenwriter. He spent his entire life in Cairo, the setting for almost all his fiction. He is best known for The Cairo Trilogy— Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957) and Sugar Street (1957)—which follows succeeding generations of a Cairene family, the Abd al-Jawads, from World War I until the Egyptian revolution of 1952. In 1988, Mahfouz became the first, and so far, the only, Arab writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In 2019, famed journalist and writer Aatish Taseer was thrown out of India. Soon after he wrote a cover article for Time calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi the country’s “divider in chief”, New Delhi decided to revoke his residency.
Aatish Taseer, with roots in England, India, Pakistan, and the USA, appears to be a member of the globalized elite, able to call multiple nations his own. For Taseer, however, there is only one country he calls home. A self-described “Indian writer”, Taseer, for much of his adult life, has distanced himself from his absentee, Pakistani politician father. Still, despite Taseer’s best efforts, his father’s nationality has come back to haunt him.
Ma Thanegi’s roots are deeply planted in Myanmar. She’s the great-niece of a noble scoundrel who once ornamented the court of King Thibaw, her country’s last king, and the great-granddaughter of one of the last queen’s ladies-in-waiting. The daughter of a sophisticated, mercurial intellectual and the brilliant, tempestuous beauty who was his wife, Ma Thanegi has spent her life in Myanmar with the ambition of revealing its beauties and virtues to the rest of the world. She’s achieved her goal through her writing, with six books written in English and published internationally, but until now her own story has been told only in fragments.
Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You, Candice Chung’s “memoir of saying the unsayable with food”, feels like a glimpse into her peri-pandemic journal. The title refers to the often-shared recognition by the children of immigrants, that expressions of love are indirect, and also filtered through food.
Chris Stowers, longtime photographer, credits a fellow journalist for the title of his latest memoir, Shoot, Ask … and Run. The journalist’s advice to a young Chris, just starting out, went like this. Shoot: Take the photo when the opportunity arises. Then, if someone notices that you took a photo, “ask” for permission to use the photo. Finally, if the subject seems annoyed, “run” … particularly if he or she has a gun.
For many Asian families, it might be difficult not to have a memory of ginseng. I remember my mother making tea from American ginseng and my violin teacher using it to infuse his vodka. But I can’t remember ever asking about it or even why it was continually referred to as “American” ginseng, rather than just ginseng.
You must be logged in to post a comment.