Book Box: Tales of displacement, separation and self-discovery
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SINGAPORE – In this week’s Book Box, The Straits Times looks at the stories of those who have left the countries of their birth. Buy the books at Amazon
I have been displaced all my life: Chilean-American author Isabel Allende on identifying with refugees
Isabel Allende's novel tackles the trauma of children displaced from their homes and forcibly separated from parents.
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY UK
Isabel Allende, 80, reflected on her childhood experiences of displacement for her latest novel, The Wind Knows My Name.
Over a Zoom call from her home office in California, she says: “I was born in Peru and when I was three years old, my father abandoned my mother. We moved back to my grandfather’s house in Chile and I lived there until my mother married a diplomat.”
Those early years in Chile provided structure and stability that Allende would crave during her later peripatetic life.
Book review: Legendary Chinese pirate queen Shek Yeung’s life gets half-hearted feminist retelling
The tale of Chinese pirate queen Shek Yeung, also known as Madam Ching, Ching Shih and Cheng-Yi Sao, is ripe for reclamation especially in the post-#MeToo era and with interest in Asian stories at an all-time high in Western publishing circles.
Born in 1775, Shek Yeung’s life is proof that fact can be stranger than fiction.
She was a brothel worker before she married pirate king Cheng Yat. Upon his death, variously recorded as drowned or murdered during a typhoon off Vietnam, Shek Yeung inherited his fleet and married his adopted son Cheung Po.
To top it all off, the wily Shek Yeung was smart enough to barter a pardon from the Qing authorities while the going was good, retiring to run various brothels and gaming enterprises till her death at 69 in 1844.
Book review: Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s Dust Child fails to dig deep into lives of Vietnamese mixed-race children
Deep As The Sky, Red As The Sea by novelist Rita Chang-Eppig tells the story of real-life Chinese pirate queen Shek Yeung.
PHOTOS: BLOOMSBURY
This sophomore novel by Vietnamese poet-author Nguyen Phan Que Mai is a middling, feel-good exploration of the lives of Amerasian children left in Vietnam after the Vietnam War.
Born of American soldiers and Vietnamese mothers, Amerasians form an underclass in communist Vietnam referred to as the bui doi, or dust of life.
Their Caucasian features are seen as evidence of their mothers’ wartime betrayal and many are discriminated against, leading indigent lives and often homeless.
It should make for a sordid story full of grit, but Que Mai, author of the best-selling The Mountains Sing (2020), has chosen to shear it of any teeth by offering a rather sanitised version of events.
Book review: Love and self-discovery in Nicola Dinan’s Bellies
Bellies by Nicola Dinan is a funny yet heartbreaking love story that brims with pop culture references.
PHOTOS: TIMES DISTRIBUTION, STUART SIMPSON
Nicola Dinan’s debut novel is a modern-day and intimate coming-of-age book spanning multiple cultures in true cosmopolitan style.
A funny, tender and heartbreaking love story about two individuals finding themselves, Bellies brims with pop culture references and a peppy sarcastic tone.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers July 22
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers July 22.
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF BERKLEY, COURTESY OF FLATIRON BOOKS, COURTESY OF SCHOLASTIC
This week’s bestsellers see Ali Hazelwood and BTS in first place for the second week in a row.
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