The Bookcast Club

#49 Reading More Asian Authors

June 18, 2021 The Bookcast Club Episode 49

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The Bookcast Club

Jun 18, 2021 Episode 49

The Bookcast Club

In this episode, Sarah K welcomes back Christine, a previous fabulous guest on the podcast. They discuss their journey this year in trying to read more Asian authors, the idea of diversity in publishing, why they care about reading widely, and have some fabulous book recommendations for you! The episode transcript should be accessible from within your podcasting app - or check out the transcript here.

Follow Christine on Instagram and check out her website on storytelling, StoryCraft. You can also listen to our previous episode with Christine.

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Books mentioned:
Karma Cola by Gita Mehta
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler
Bestiary by K Min Chung
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan
Out by Natsuo Kirino
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
The Butcher's Wife by Li Ang
The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai (Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai)
Kim Ji Young Born 1982 by Cho Nam-ju
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Green Island by Shawn Yang Ryan
Kololo Hill by Neema Shah
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
Flatland by Edwin Abott Abott
Rose, Rose, I Love You by Wang Zhenhe
Two Trees Make A Forest by Jessica J Lee
The Accusation by Bandi
Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea by Guy Delisle
Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle
Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China by Guy Delisle
Wild Swans by Jung Chang
The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri
Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
A God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

And a bonus recommendation: The Dancing Girl and the Turtle by Karen Kao!

We encourage you to support independent bookshops or libraries. You can find a list of independent bookshops to support on our website, many of which do home delivery.

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00:00:00 CHRISTINE

But essentially, I was on a little tiny island in Nicaragua with my husband. It was the kind of place that wasn't even really restaurants, you went to the next little tiny hotel and they had two tables and you ate there. So we went to the next little really tiny hotel or lodge or whatever, and there were two other guys in this little tiny restaurant and they were from Arnhem.

00:00:20 SARAH

Oh my God, so Arnhem is this in this small city that is just north of where we live in the Netherlands.

00:00:24 CHRISTINE

They were from like 10 minutes away from where my husband grew up and they all looked at each other and kind of turned their backs, like we’re just going to pretend this isn't happening.

00:00:33 SARAH

So when I was in high school I lived in Germany for a while and did like an exchange. I did a semester of my high school there, but there was another girl there who was from she was from Flinders Island which if you can imagine what Tasmania looks like in Australia, it's one of the little island like ears at the top.

00:00:49 CHRISTINE

Tasmania has ears?

00:00:49 SARAH

Ears, well, you know it it's got. I mean look up a picture of Tasmania if you don't know what I'm talking about but it has these two little like top bits and she was from one of those little islands.

And then we went to Berlin together and we were at the Alexander Platz., which is this big shopping center in Berlin. And we were in this shop and then she just turns around. She's like oh, there's my neighbor! [laughs]

THEME MUSIC PLAYS

00:01:24 SARAH

Hello, welcome to the Bookcast Club, a fortnightly podcast by 4 bookish pals. Today it's Sarah K and I'm here with Christine, friend of the podcast and a previous guest, and together we're going to talk about Asian authors. Hi Christine! So great to have you back.

You did an episode with us… When was it? October last year? I think six months ago.

So do you want to tell us about the context of why we're here today? Talking about this episode, 'cause it was really, it was really you that started this off right?

00:01:53 CHRISTINE

Yeah, the last year was the year of Black Lives Matter for very very good reason and as I got into the year and doing a lot of my own work on trying to learn things and understand things and getting involved in diversity and inclusion work, I started to realize that frankly, my bookshelves had way more black authors than Asian authors, and that felt a little bit crooked… in Dutch we would say ‘scheef’, so it felt crooked because I'm a half Asian and you would think I would think that I would have some interest there, but the dominant discourse around when we talk about minority authors is that we talk about black authors, and so this kind of pushed a button for me and I decided that 2021 was going to be my year of reading more Asian authors. But of course that brings up all kinds of issues about who are those authors? How do you find the books? Which books are you going to read endlessly? And I think that's kind of how we started doing this and you and I have been getting together about once a month or so with two other both Korean women to talk about a couple of books, and they've been really good conversations, so yeah.

We're kind of starting a bit of a journey.

00:03:04 SARAH

Yeah, it's also been - obviously I'm white, but I was the same as you. All the people that I was reading that were non white or black authors generally like American authors, which is great.

However, as an Australian in Australia, when we're talking about racism and race discussions, actually most of the time what we're talking about is people who have immigrated from Asia. So to be reading about black writers is very important, but it's not maybe the most most relevant thing to my country. So as I've started reading more, I've realized how much more relevant this is to me and how much more clocked in I should be [to these issues].

00:03:38 CHRISTINE

That’s so funny, cause I’ve never ever thought about that.

00:03:42 SARAH

Yeah, it's I never really thought about it either. But like if you think about where Australia is in your head, where is it? It's just below Asia like and a lot of the rest discussions in Australia are around Asian minorities.

00:03:54 CHRISTINE

Yeah, and I mean my experience growing up. You know, I'm half Taiwanese and my dad is a very Caucasian white guy from Chicago, and you know my experience growing up is that being an Asian minority, it’s almost like a being a child, you're seen but not heard in the sense that it's not something you talk about. The idea is to try to blend in and you know it's different now. It's really really different now. To watch people you know - you and I have had several discussions about, you have a Taiwanese friend who would never call herself Chinese because she's politically tuned in in a in a different way, but she also grew up in a really different era.

You know, I grew up telling people I'm Taiwanese and they said, oh, Thailand, I've been there and I, you know, constantly explain the difference between Taiwan and Thailand and then also, Chinese ethnically and what it is, but that's complicated, so it's the discussion about what it is to be Asian and Asian identity has changed just in my getting-longer lifetime, so that's part of it for me too.

Your question was what's in Asian author?

00:05:02 SARAH

Yeah, what do you think an Asian author is?

00:05:06 CHRISTINE

It's interesting because now the when we talk about Asian authors, India tends to be is included and I didn't come up with that being the category we talked about the Indians and the continent, and when I think about including Indian authors English Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi to a degree. Sri Lankan kind of in the category of Asian authors… What happens to me is a disconnect because Indian authors have been much more present in the English language literature forever on account of colonization by the by the Brits.

And so I went back and looked because some you had mentioned something about. No Asian author has ever won a Nobel Prize for Literature, which is astounding, yeah, and in 1913 Tagore won a Nobel Prize for Literature.

And if we go back and like Rushdie was publishing in the 1970s, and there's a book called Karma Cola, which is about western tourists in India that was written in 1990s and so I feel like there's been an Indian literature that we have had more access to, and being more aware than more involved with for a longer time than a lot of what I think of as Asian authors. But they're probably more correctly East Asian authors or Southeast Asian.

Others, you know. Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia... Indonesia was amazingly, not even on my radar as a country until I moved to the Netherlands, which is a bizarre experience.

00:06:32 SARAH

Yeah. So Indonesia, if you're not aware was colonized or occupied by the Netherlands for a while, so here there's a lot more Indonesian migrants and that kind of thing.

But the thing I always found funny is that like a country like Indonesia is, it's enormous. It has, I think the population is like 110 million or something then it's huge.

00:06:51 CHRISTINE

There are more Muslims in Indonesia than any other country on Earth like that's how big it is.

00:06:55 SARAH

And if you think about like we use the word Asia, which we probably shouldn't because it's this huge area of land. Something like I read 60% of all people on Earth are from some part of the Asian [continent].

You know one in five people in the world is Indian one in five is Chinese… It's insane and we don't really have any appreciation for the sight of the scale of some of these in inverted commas, smaller countries, like Indonesia.

00:07:23 CHRISTINE

Yeah, because our radars are so tuned to something different and it's ironic because my kids will talk about Africa and I keep saying to them, Africa is not a country. Yeah, but I don't say Asia is not a country.

Yeah, so when for me when I decided to read Asian authors it had a lot to do with trying to read more Taiwanese and Chinese authors of probably also Japanese, 'cause I'm also very curious about it. And that comes a bit from a course of the Japanese fascination that many people share. But also, Taiwan was occupied by the Japanese, so for my family the If you look at the influences in my family my grandmother - my grandmother lived under Japanese occupation and my family has nine generations in Taiwan but before that, was from China.

So those are those are for me the areas that I was interested in reading about and I'm, you know, happy to pick up what comes along the way, but a surprising number of Korean authors this year.

00:08:20 SARAH

So as we started to do this and like try to be more conscious about picking up Asian writers. Something that I found really hard to find is - where are these people? How do you find them?

Most of the time I find my books through like other podcasts or through like I like a couple of radio shows that are book focused, Instagram and I really had to start looking for things that weren't. If they exist they tend to be like people who are maybe first or second generation but living in like the US UK, whatever. And I'm like where are the people who actually live in these countries? I want to read from them. It's really bloody hard to find them.

00:08:58 CHRISTINE

But it is really hard because they have to do well in the country they're from and then get translated to English and that translation is a massive step and that doesn't happen very often.

I enjoyed doing quite a bit of research last night for this and one of the things I found is that Murakami, who everyone has read, wrote Norwegian Wood in 1987. But it didn't get translated into English until 2000. So that’s 13 years and what comes before him getting translated into English is Memoirs Of A Geisha by Arthur Golden who's an American guy.

But that one came out in I think 1997 and so what I what I noticed as I was looking through all these different titles that I've read is that you have kind of these gateway books by written by in English by either immigrants or people who are ethnically from another country, or you know white folks writing about another country and those come out initially written English through the lens of someone who has come up, who has grown up, or is culturally from you know, the States or the UK usually, or Australia, Richard Flanagan.

And they write about these countries and that kind of opens the door for publishers to see that these books sell well, that people are interested in the translations come afterwards, and so you know, it's an interesting process, and if I look through what I'm aware of in literature you can see there's lots of books, Korean books now have become really popular and I think you can probably thank Pachinko for that happening for creating an interest.

You know there's a couple of books, I think Pachinko and then The Orphan Master’s Son kind of created interest where people realize Korea exists and want to read about it.

But if you were looking for books, I mean I am not very good at following people on Instagram. I'm not very good at listening to book podcasts. Sorry everybody. But I Google… [laughs] I feel like this dates me! I just Google like ‘Taiwan Books’, ‘books about Taiwan’.

00:11:02 SARAH

If it was going to date you would be on Yahoo something.

00:11:06 CHRISTINE

[laughs] I go to library and get the card catalog under Japan and just see what’s there.

But I'll go through, you know, three or four or five lists that people put together and often that'll get me to interesting places. Like you know, people who are blogging exclusively about Asian authors or Asian organizations that are promoting a particular country or a particular way of looking at things, and I'll look through those lists and read and see generally what pops up on three or more lists and go that way.

00:11:36 SARAH

Yeah, I actually think though that that's necessary if that's what you want to do. If that's what you're looking for because these books are not pushed by publishers. I don't think they don't have the marketing budget we like as in we of the podcast hear about so many books that are coming out, it gets like shoved down our throats.

We get ARCs - ARCs is an advanced readers copy, which you might get if you're a book reviewer, in order to have a review out of a book before it comes out and help promote the book so there will be some books that come out that we will see absolutely everywhere. Everyone will be looking for this ARC. The publisher will be after people to put it on their podcasts or put it in their whatever they're doing newsletter, whatever they're doing.

And so some books that come out I, we're so aware of them and we almost don't have to be active about finding books at all because it just sort of passively comes to us because we have all these like different revenues.

For these books that that is not the case, they're not pushed. I'm thinking the book I'm thinking of is Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler, which is an American title that was absolutely everywhere earlier this year before it even came out because the publishers were like, hey, let's ever make sure everyone buys this book, let's put loads of money into it, let's give everyone these great shiny hardbacks, so make sure they push it and there seems to be just no budget for these kind of things.

Which then means, the circle they don't sell that well because people don't know that they're there for the next one doesn't have that much, it's just a an ongoing cycle of it.

00:12:58 CHRISTINE

OK, so let's send a special note to publishers who are listening we hope. We would like to see more Asian authors and we, you know the whole continent is fine.

Whatever you want, we'd like to have the opportunity to make more people aware of them and to be able to look at that literature. And it doesn't have to be special or readable or digestible for a particular audience. So let the reading be an experience. I'm thinking of Bestiary, which we read for book club by…

00:13:52 SARAH

K-Ming Chang.

00:13:52 CHRISTINE

Yyeah, and you know, it was an incredibly difficult and challenging read and it was brilliant because of that. I don't really understand what happened fully. I can kind of pull together, maybe something of a timeline and I didn't go back and re read or look at it again, but I know that everyone who read it appreciated, you know, as people who like to read books, appreciated that it was challenging that it was new, that it was doing something we hadn't seen before and there is definitely an audience, I think, there's a significant audience out there who's looking for a new way of hearing stories told, of reading stories told, of reading about human experience or reading about different ways to see the world. There are great stories that come out all the time.

There are you know, thousands upon thousands of good books out there, but people are also hungry and willing to challenge themselves with something that's unfamiliar. You know - it's COVID. We can't go on vacation, let's read interesting books.

00:14:50 SARAH

Yeah for sure. Can we just go back to what you said before about how you need these kind of gateway books like the Richard Flanagan book and Arthur Golden etc. That kind of makes me sad that we need this like Western-centric way to make us think about other cultures. What do you think?

00:15:05 CHRISTINE

Why does it make you sad?

00:15:05 SARAH

Because I wish that I could just be interested in other cultures without needing my hand held by someone else to get me thinking about them. You know, I wish that I would just pick those things up without –

00:15:17 CHRISTINE

I think you ask a lot of yourself in that way, and I think it's asking a lot of people.

You know, everyone should just be curious about the whole world all the time.

I don't think you're failing as a human being if you’re not always curious about everything all the time and things you haven't even heard of.

But you know - I'm going to be talking. I'm actually giving a webinar next week about embracing your ignorance as a starting point for intercultural work and diversity and inclusion work. I've been thinking a lot about what's the difference between ignorance and a lack of knowledge and the thing about ignorance is ignorance is when you don't know what you don't know and you don't know what you don't know about the books that are out there and I don't reasonably expect to go into a bookstore and for them to say, you know, here's 17 books you've never heard of, have a look. It's also exhausting to look at that as a consumer.

And so I think there is an argument for the gateway books as a consumer in terms of how we discover something. I don't think it's fair or it doesn't make me happy, on the other hand, to think, to realize, or to think that publishers are waiting for those books to break open the floodgates. I would like to know that publishers are going to publish good literature and that maybe our interest in that literature will be piqued by something that is kind of a gateway experience into it.

And you look at something you know, The Queen's Gambit in chess right now. There's hundreds of thousands of people out there right now who never played chess before, who went well. That was a cool movie. Let me try and it's OK, I don't think that you know anybody hasn't wasted years of their life 'cause they weren't playing chess and I think that I don't think that's new that it's like that.

I think our awareness of the infinite possibilities in the world is heightened because we have so much reach we have, you know, these little square boxes we carry around all the time that give us access to the entire world and iIt's OK if you need to have someone go in and say lLet me put your attention over this way. You disagree.

00:17:20 SARAH

I don't disagree! I think what you're saying is very… wise.

00:17:21 CHRISTINE

[laughs] Are you calling me old?

00:17:26 SARAH

No! To me it almost feels like you need some kind of stamp of approval from some person, like Richard Flanagan to make something interesting, but I guess I'm just being too harsh.

00:17:38 CHRISTINE

I don’t know. Like I never really ate vegan food until you turned up at book club and we had to have vegan potlucks, because there were vegans coming to book club. And it was frightening to me. It was really intimidating because I didn't get it. I didn't understand how food could be good. I didn't know how you would do it and meeting you and you know our group decision to do a vegan potluck because that's the most inclusive food we can think of opened up something for me where I went. Hey, actually this is cool and now I find myself looking for vegan food and just picking up a vegan cookbook because I have a better idea of how many options are there. So you're my gateway vegan, and if that means that I'm going to be eating more of that food and then introducing other people to have food, and I become their gateway vegan or every once in a while cooking person. That's OK.

00:18:31 SARAH

OK, that's an interesting analogy. Alright, I'm coming around to your side of things. Now our book club’s full of vegans [laughs]

00:18:31 CHRISTINE

Is it really?

00:18:33 SARAH

Our book club? Yeah.

00:18:39 CHRISTINE

Yeah, yeah, that's true. It really is. [laughs]

You asked about picking books and I talked about where I look for books, but also there's a type of book I'm looking for, which is - we talked about gateway books as books that kind of introduce a culture and I particularly think of books like Joy Luck Club and Pachinko having done that for some of the countries I'm interested in. Memoirs Of A Geisha.

00:19:05 SARAH

Crazy Rich Asians.

00:19:07 CHRISTINE

Yes! Put Singapore on the map. I'm looking for books that aren’t replacements for history books. That aren't ‘here's how you can look into the goldfish bowl that’s Singapore’ kind of thing.

And I've, you know, been really lucky to find some books that I thought were amazing and they were embedded in the culture. Kind of like, you know, if you read a book written by an American, it's not about what it means to be American. It's about what it means to live a very specific life and those are the books I've ended up enjoying the most and have a deeper relationship with because I don't feel like I'm reading a history book. I feel like I'm really reading what literature is supposed to do for me, which is, you know, a personal story that has the universal underneath it, and that that's what I'm looking for in books.

So yeah, those have been my definitely been my favorite stories and just some examples I wrote down is out which I talk about all the time in book club is Out by Natsuo Kirino. It's this really bizarre Japanese - I don't know how to genre it, but it's about a woman who takes dismembering bodies as a side job.

You know Convenience Store Woman did the same thing for me. The Butcher's Wife is a Taiwanese novel that was written in the 80s that is similar talks about village life. We both read The Mountains Sing recently. I was a bit sad that it had to be about the war, that it had to be it about the Vietnam War.

We were just talking before we turned the microphone on about how so many things happened in Vietnam that were not the Vietnam War. And yet that's what all the literature is about. Yeah, but this at least was a story that didn't include Americans or Australians or the French, and it was about you know people who live there.

Kim Ji Young Born 1982, feels like it does also something similar. It's really specific about a person at a time and a place and it doesn't feel like it's giving me some kind of Korean history lesson.

00:20:58 SARAH

Yeah, the thing that I loved about that, Kim Ji Young, is that it was so immersive. I was really, completely in that story and in that world I really I really, really loved that. It reminded me a little bit of The Vegetarian in that way. It had that same kind of like deeply immersive feeling. Han Kang is probably one of my favorite authors in translation.

00:21:19 CHRISTINE

Her, it's interesting how both those books were so claustrophobic.

00:21:23 SARAH

Yes, for sure.

00:21:23 CHRISTINE

Just a feeling of women living lives that they were trapped in. But what an awful theme. [laughs]

00:21:32 SARAH

Well, yeah, except I read about this all the time from all over the world so it’s like ah great [laughs]

Here we go again.

00:21:37 CHRISTINE

More women trapped in their life. A universal problem.

00:21:39 SARAH

Yeah, exactly. So final question before we move on.

Maybe we've already talked about it, but why is it overall so important to you to do this? But for me it's really important for me to read these books so that I feel like I can understand - I can't really understand but feel like I can have a certain degree of empathy for people all over the world like I really want to be able to understand how life is for people, to be aware of how life is for people. If I meet someone from, uh, a random country and I don't know much about like what has happened in their country or what, what their life story might be about.

For me I find that really troubling, so for me, I just really want to try and like understand about how other people live outside of like my own little personal box, you know.

00:22:31 CHRISTINE

That's very altruistic.

00:22:34 SARAH

I don't know if it is. [laughs] Completionist, maybe? I don't know [laughs]

But yeah for me, because I live as an expert. I meet a lot of people from all over the world as I the longer I stay here, the more I become like more aware of how different, how specific to your own experiences, your thoughts and stuff are. And also I realize that how much of my own thinking is just shaped by my culture and my own experience and you sort of, you know, as you as you meet more people, you're like, oh, do I actually believe this or is this just like what happened in my little world as I was when I was a child?

00:23:06 CHRISTINE

But it's very unusual and special that you're even asking yourself those questions. I mean, I work with lots of people in this stuff and most people just go that person is crazy or wrong.

Or you know, it's very much easier to go straight to judgment than to look at yourself and say is this is really what I want to be thinking? And even deeper, why am I thinking that that so yeah, altruistic and good job.

00:23:22 SARAH

[laughs] Thank you.

00:23:29 CHRISTINE

No, it's really, it's very special to be honest in my opinion.

00:23:34 SARAH

I also though - I will give credit to the fact that I live in a country where a lot of people have told me that what I think is incorrect because it doesn't line up with their own experience, so that's why it's kind of prompted me to think that. [laughs]

00:23:46 CHRISTINE

[laughs] You are very lucky to live in a country people are happy to tell you you're wrong.

That's one thing, Oh my goodness.

Uh, my reasons are really, really, infinitely more selfish than yours. Which is that I grew up in the United States and Germany and Saudi Arabia and Switzerland, and never was connected to my Taiwanese background, history, person, identity.

Almost at all, you know - I was born in the 70s and there's in the States a whole generation of you know, half white, half Asian kids born then because our dads were in the military. But once you leave the States, there are very few people my age of mixed race, Asian and white. And it was, you know, partly because I was traveling so much learning about Taiwan and Taiwanese history was never really a thing. My mom didn't communicate a lot of history lessons in ways that I understood in the sense that it's not that we celebrated Double Ten Day and I knew what that meant. Things came along in bits and pieces and for her, it was hard for her to understand why I didn't understand these things already, 'cause she had grown up with them and for me everything felt so disjointed as to have no meaning at all.

And really, the book Green Island, which you know I talked about so much before, which is about the history of Taiwan starting in 1949, it's about people, but also the history of Taiwan was one of the first time that it fell together. What my mom had been through and what some of the consequences were and what life in Taiwan was like when she was a kid, and this despite having gone, you know - now it's maybe 15 years ago, looking for books on Taiwanese history and reading a couple books that time in history which were about the politics and the government, but not about what life was like on the ground. And so I'm looking to kind of understand the depth of this culture that you know I somewhat identify with. People definitely hold me responsible for and I want to feel some ownership of it as well. And for me, there's the second part of that. But you know, I have kids now and I want to pass that on to them.

I want my kids to feel like they are Dutch and American and Taiwanese and not feel like any of those have to be graded or secondary or I don't know much about it. So there's multiple layers, but for me it's extremely selfish. [Sarah laughs]

It's all for me 'cause I want it.

00:26:34 SARAH

By the way, listeners, since we originally talked about Green Island, I have read it as well and I will wholeheartedly agree with you. You look surprised, did I not tell you that I’d read it? I borrowed your copy!

00:26:47 CHRISTINE

You also borrowed a couple of other books that didn't get read.

00:26:48 SARAH

OK, well, be that as it may… [laughs] I read Green Island and it was fantastic. I really really enjoyed it.

00:26:55 CHRISTINE

It's amazing.

00:26:56 SARAH

Yeah yeah, wholeheartedly agree. So if you haven't read it - I mean all the all of the books that we talked about earlier in the show notes, but I would definitely recommend that one.

Shall we talk about publishing a bit?

I was reading some reports yesterday about this sort of diversity quote unquote thing in publishing. Pretty depressing stuff.

I could only find US and UK specific publishing stats. But for both of those in terms of like percentage of authors published that are Asian, and this is including people living in Asia, people not living in Asia, it's like 6%. Real good. And it hasn't changed really in the last like five years.

So one of the reports I was looking at yesterday was looking at changes in the last four years and it's- well gone down slightly by half a percentage from like 7 to 6.5%.

00:27:39 CHRISTINE

I really liked that one, it was funny. They were like yeah nothing has changed. Yeah, that's our conclusion. [laughs] Very little is happening.

00:27:47 SARAH

Yeah, and also I think what's kind of happening is that even with like black writers like what is really happening in reality is that writers like Bernardine Evaristo - she's been writing for years and so now the publishers are like, oh, by the way we do have this stuff. In terms of actually getting new people that have been turned - once were turned away by editors? Rejected? Do you say rejected?

00:28:12 CHRISTINE

I try not to say the word.

00:28:14 SARAH

For people for whom the editors have previously said thank you, but no thank you not at this time. , but it's not changing much.

00:28:22 CHRISTINE

It's not changing, but you know, you have a whole culture behind writing like you know.

People going to MFA programs in order to become writing writers or to have the context to understand the business? I mean, I don't understand how you get a book published. What does it take to get into an MFA program? What does it take to get into a writing fellowship?

There's a whole background to it. It's an incredibly difficult business to break into, and it is a business.

And I think the publishers are the end line of a probably a long set of problems you know. Are we teaching people to write? Are we encouraging people to write? Are we encouraging writing as a form of expression to kids in all different kinds of schools?

Are we affording kids the opportunities to have space to write? Do kids have quiet spaces where they can you know, like I think it's of course, one of those things that you think is small and it's huge and it's overwhelming then, but yeah.

00:29:20 SARAH

But I think as everyday readers, what we can do is read those books, give them reviews on like Goodreads and Storygraph. Those kinds of things.

If you're going to buy a book if you're tossing up between two books, buy one from a minority writer that's like, you know, talk with your dollar. Let your money speak. Put your money where your mouth is? [laughs] Something like that? Like you know, get those books out from the library, add to the statistics of people reading those books. Yeah, that's the difference that you can make, I think.

00:29:50 CHRISTINE

And the podcast community and the Instagram book community is huge and vocal and I think has the opportunity to have a voice and say something and the publishing industry will listen if it flips. If the work of all those people becomes about I'd like to shape the kind of books I can read and not I want to be recognized for my interest in books and what I have to say about books and I think there's a principle shift that can happen and not everyone going to do it, and that's fine. But if enough people do it and enough people are advocating it, then maybe a publishing company will listen to some of the few people really actually have their attention.

You know the publishing companies know that the popular Instagram book people, the popular YouTube book people, the popular podcast book people - they have a large audience. And if their audiences are all for having more Asian authors, then maybe those books will finally start coming out. If 5, 10, 15, 20 podcasts have this discussion, maybe we'll start to see things change from the demand side as well.

00:30:52 SARAH

Sure, the other thing I would say is if you're someone who doesn't necessarily have a platform, you're just a reader. I've only just recently come to realize how much authors value nice reviews and how much they actually engage with the book community. So we've received some really nice messages from like Neema Shah for example, who wrote Kololo Hill. She's an Indian writer and like Tara June Winch, the First Nations Australian writer.

Really nice messages saying that you know, I really enjoyed what you said or thanking us for reviews and that kind of stuff. And if you write a nice review on Goodreads or on Storygraph and it's a smaller a writer who's not as popular, they probably will see it and they will really appreciate it.

And if you write something nice, yeah, it will really make their day and they really read them and they really appreciate it.

00:31:34 CHRISTINE

Yeah, and I mean I've definitely written personal emails to people whose books touched me. A book can be an incredibly personal experience. Uhm, and then I think do it! Let people know their work is appreciated.

00:31:46 SARAH

Yeah for sure. Yeah, these smaller writers who are doing a lot of their own publicity and that kind of stuff, they really appreciate it.

00:31:50 CHRISTINE

Yeah, there's nothing worse than feeling like you're shouting into the void.

00:31:51 SARAH

Yeah… how relatable. [laughter]

I will link this little report. There's a little nice little summary of this report that I was reading yesterday about the UK, but they're talking about the problems that are in publishing, the barriers that are in publishing that are stopping these kind of books getting out there and a lot of it is about assumption about audiences.

What they think people want. There seems to be this like assumption that the publishers think that any book by a minority writer is for a minority, whereas any book by white person is for everyone.

00:32:26 CHRISTINE

Oh, right, 'cause that's the norm. So we all want that, right? No. No, what if any, book by a human is interesting because it's written by a human who was also born and lived and had pain and had joy and had sadness and fell in love and got their heart broken and could also be interesting.

00:32:43 SARAH

Christine, don’t be silly.

Did we talk about the like trauma narrative as well, did we? [laughs]

Sorry, we don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.

00:32:52 CHRISTINE

No, it's just like… if you’re a racialized human your life is not just pain.

You know good things happen. I don't know. I had an original thought yesterday and I don't do these all the time, so I want to share it with you.

00:33:04 SARAH

[laughs] I’m going to write this down!

00:33:05 CHRISTINE

I think it was a good one. Which is it started with books by Asian authors don't always have to be about being Asian like if you're a racialized person, you don't have to only write about being your race.

I very recently read Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu and Charles Yu writes a lot of science fiction which I don't know if I would read.

But Interior Chinatown won the National Book Award for fiction. Charles Yu is Taiwanese, somewhere back there and I went “yeah! My people!” and bought the book right away and it's written as a screenplay, so it's fantastic to look at with like big Courier fonts that you know were all the same size, so it looks like a typewriter.

Excellent book to look at and it basically does - if all Asian books could only be about being Asian times a million. It's to the nth degree, so it's really only about how this character in this life is trying to achieve maximum character-ness by becoming a certain character in the screenplay. And it kind of folds in on itself. And it reminds me of Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott.

00:34:18 SARAH

Never heard of it.

00:34:24 CHRISTINE

Written in 1884, I looked it up last night which is about living in dimensions. It was written by I think he was a math teacher and it's about a dot. What happens when a dot meets a line can adopt understand what a line is because of a line has more dimensions. This kind of thing and what Interior Chinatown does it kind of accomplishes that if you only get to be a 1 dimensional human being.

What happens when you try to achieve more dimensions and be that? Will you ever be allowed to achieve that? Or do you always have to revert back to being a dot?

It was spectacular. The writing is great and the story is good and it's wonderful to read. But as a way to think about the experience of being you know the “Asian man”. Really, for me it felt like it went into the fact that if you only let the Asian man ever just be an Asian man, then it just folds back on itself then that's all you get. You can't have more dimensions, it just collapses and I think that is a problem when our literature is only about being erased, or if it's only about what is it to be half Taiwanese in America.

If that's the only subject matter we’re ever talking about, then we're missing out on a whole ton of other things. Far more interesting stories to be told.

So I think you know. Tell more different stories. Let's read more different stories. Let's allow people to be multidimensional.

00:35:46 SARAH

Yes, let's not restrict these stories to the trauma they experienced during the war. How difficult it was for them to live in a different country after they immigrated after a war like it's…

00:35:58 CHRISTINE

Intergenerational trauma also very important.

00:36:01 SARAH

Intergenerational trauma. Just read some stuff about just people living their lives having a good time.

00:36:06 CHRISTINE

Which is exciting enough anyway.

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00:37:11 SARAH

OK, So what we might do now is we'll just quickly go through some Asian countries and we have some recommendations for them. We obviously don't have one for every Asian country because of aforementioned how hard that is, and also because we're only not that far into this long journey.

00:37:29 CHRISTINE

We’re only two people!

00:37:30 SARAH

[laughs] We’re only two people. Asia is a big place. We'll get there, you guys.

00:37:33 CHRISTINE

It is the whole thing, right? Like where do you find more books. And this is, this is the plea. Please share your recommendations for Asian authors. However, you understand Asia because we'd like to read more.

00:37:46 SARAH

So let's go. Let's start with Taiwan, why not?

Yeah, so first we recommend Green Island by Shawna Yang Ryan which we also talked about in great detail on Christine’s last episode, which we'll link in the show notes, but fantastic.

00:38:00 CHRISTINE

It's just amazing. It's just amazing. If you want to get into kind of the life in Taiwan. The Butcher's Wife, 1983, by Li Ang is about kind of life in a village. There's another book called Rose, Rose, I Love You by Wang Zhenhe, which is about American GIs in Taiwan. Does not paint a pretty picture of American GIS, but I love you dad!

And I also very very recently read Two Trees Make A Forest by Jessica J Lee, which was a wonderful read, because it's a naturalist looking at Taiwan. So instead of talking about like people in cities, it's about a lot about her hiking and it's a memoir. I need to write her an email because her background sounds a lot like mine in terms of Caucasian father, Taiwanese mother, international. That book really spoke to me, made me wanna go back to I want to go hiking.

00:38:57 SARAH

Yeah, I can't wait to read that. I've got that on my list. It looks fantastic. Beautiful cover as well. Love it.

Korea. So Korea is a country that South Korea, especially that we have read a lot of stuff from. Actually because in the aforementioned little reading group that we have, we just keep going back to Korea.

00:39:12 CHRISTINE

That’s cause we're outnumbered by the Koreans [laughs]

00:39:15 SARAH

I have actually read a book actually, tangential. I've read in the, I think the only book in North Korea that's been translated into English from an author that's still living in Korea. Yeah, it's called The Accusation. It's by - the writer’s called “Bandi”, but this is a pseudonym. It's a collection of like short stories, they're kind of folklore slash short stories. Really cool. I'll lend it to you if you like.

00:39:39 CHRISTINE

You have to also read Pyongyang, which is by Guy Delisle. It's a graphic novel and his books are brilliant. Think the stories is he’s kind of tagging along with his wife and this is a lot about him and his kid. And the absurdity of life there. Very very very good book. Actually, his books are all really good. I'm looking at the list right now, but he goes. There's also Burma. There's China there.

00:40:04 SARAH

So I really love Han Kang. Who’s Korean. I've borrowed loads of her books from you actually, especially The Vegetarian.

00:40:11 CHRISTINE

Do you have my copy?

00:40:12 SARAH

No, I gave it back. Two years ago.

00:40:13 CHRISTINE

Mine is missing…

00:40:19 SARAH

Oh, I certainly gave it back to you. Well, it's not here. [laughs]

The Vegetarian is fantastic. I really, really loved it. I've also read, yeah, a couple of her other books. The Vegetarian is definitely my favorite and in terms of like getting immersed sense of a culture and feeling like you're really living in someone else's shoes, The Vegetarian is unparalleled, I would say.

00:40:33 CHRISTINE

Almost yeah, it's extremely powerful writing. Excellent book, excellent book. I've also got on my list Pachinko, of course, which I enjoyed thoroughly and it was very much a history lesson, but I liked it a lot. I’ve also got Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son. Not one of those books written by a Korean, unfortunately, but it was a really great story. It's people trying to, you know, get out of Korea and about some of the things that happened.

00:41:00 SARAH

Next country. I've got China.

00:41:02 CHRISTINE

China for me started with Joy Luck Club and Wild Swans by Jung Chang, which you know, Wild Swans was three generations of Chinese women written originally in English. Jung Chang is from the UK and that book was all the rage. You could not escape it in the 90s and then Amy Tan wrote Joy Luck Club, which was about being the daughter of Chinese mother in California, made into a film.

I have to say my personal experience with the book in particular. The film was watching for the first time in my life. Scenes play out on a big screen that reminded me of my life. We went, I flew to Taiwan with my family in 2019 for my grandmother's funeral and on the flight you could watch the Joy Luck Club and Free Food For Millionaires.

And my husband is a Dutch guy who married me and has been introduced in some ways to what it means to be in an Asian family in a Taiwanese family.

And during both of those films, he was sitting across the aisle from me, and he kept leaning across and hitting me on the arm going “yeah!!” pointing at the screen, this is like your friend, this is like your mom. So The Joy Luck Club did a lot of that for me. I haven't read a lot of other Chinese authors and I have to say that is related to my upbringing which involved my mother to this day picking up things in the store, saying turning it over saying it's made in China and putting it done scoffing. But I’d like to read more.

00:42:30 SARAH

The only ones I've really read out the Poppy War series by RF Kuang, which is a fantasy series and it's based on – it’s set in China, or a fantasy version of China and it uses like Chinese mythology. I think we'll probably talk about that in more detail later in the year when we do a fantasy episode, but yeah, they're really good.

Japan. Well, of course, Yoko Ogawa, who’s I guess one of my favorite writers. I just read The Housekeeper And The Professor.

She is actually one of those writers where she's super prolific in Japan. I think she's written something like 50 novels, but only nine of them…

00:43:03 CHRISTINE

Did you say fifty? Five zero?

00:43:05 SARAH

[laughs] Yeah, 50. I was looking at her Wikipedia page this morning and I was like, oh shit! [laughter]

But only nine of them have been translated, apparently. Apparently that's a fact, but translation seems to be coming out pretty regularly now. She seems to have this one translator Steven Snyder. I think his name is, so I'm hoping that one of them will get translated.

So she wrote The Memory Police as how most people would have probably heard of her which was nominated. I think it was shortlisted for the International Booker.

And I really, really like her. Like if we're talking about just reading books from other cultures that are just novels, she's definitely would be my number one. Anyway, what is the book about? I hear you ask? Well, I'll tell you. [laughs]

The Housekeeper And The Professor is about a housekeeper and a professor. The professor is a mathematics professor who was in some kind of, I think, a car accident and he has lost his memory, so he can't form any new memories. So he's kind of stuck in this era that was like 10 or 20 years before the book takes place and the housekeeper is essentially his carer. She’s hired by his family and he's but he's perfectly fine. He just can't remember. He doesn't know what year it is. He thinks it's like 20 years ago.

And so her job is is simply to look after him and he is a highly highly educated, highly intelligent guy who was doing lots of like mathematical proofs and that kind of thing and she is - I think she didn't finish high school so they're really in terms of like the spectrum of education there from the opposite end, and it's beautiful.

It's about what they connects over. She feels that she can't do any maths. She's very afraid of maths and he always forgets who she is. He has no idea why she’s there. And so he starts to teach her maths because that's something that he can kind of remember and that's how they can connect. And so he encourages her to start doing equations and that kind of thing and he needs to say what a prime number is and she can do it. She's perfectly intelligent, so she has this idea of herself that she is incapable and she gets really into the maths. She starts doing maths in her own time.

And I just thought it was fantastic. So it's about how - it's sort of about education. It's about like university education and the kind of barriers and the I guess elitism and that kind of thing.

And then he starts tutoring her son, who's in school, and he like every day he's like, oh hello, what's your name? And he says his name, because though he's known this guy for years at this point and it was just really, really fantastic and how she chooses to treat him like she is so kind to him and it was fantastic. It was recommended to me by Katherine in our book club.

00:45:36 CHRISTINE

Oh really? It sounds like a beautiful story though.

00:45:39 SARAH

It's beautiful, yeah.

00:45:40 CHRISTINE

What I like about it is the idea that someone who would say to someone who they'd never seen before. Oh hello, how are you? Can I help you with your math? is such an essentially good person, and so you get to watch that.

Yeah, you get to watch that play out 'cause it could also be someone says oh, who are you? Yeah, what are you doing here?

00:45:53 SARAH

Yeah, her birthday. I don’t remember her birthday but it's two prime numbers and so every time he's like, when's your birthday? And she tells him every day he's like, oh, that's, I can’t remember the phrase but it’s two particular types of prime numbers and she's like, yes, I know.

And some days she says that that's that kind of prime member you know. And he's like, Oh yes, it is! [Christine laughs]

Have you read The Memory Police? Also fantastic.

00:46:11 CHRISTINE

No. But so she seems very, very interested in memory in general. I wonder why?

00:46:19 SARAH

I don't know, but I know that she has also written some nonfiction stuff with a mathematics guy so.

She also seems to be interested in how people rely on each other because there's a lot of themes in her books about memory loss and how you then start to become reliant on the other person.

So those are things that make you less independent thinking.

So The Memory Police came out a few years ago in English, but it was written I think in 1994. Yeah, exactly, I think it was the 2017 Booker it was nominated for, so that's like 15. I think it was not 15 years.

00:46:51 CHRISTINE

Was it that long ago? , 'cause I feel like it was nominated while we were friends.

00:46:52 SARAH

Oh, maybe even more recently then. Yeah, when we were friends, which was an isolated window in the past.

And then The Housekeeper and The Professor, I think came out in 2003 and then was translated in 2008. So yeah, so the order is kind of the order that they're translating is not quite right but seems to be picking up.

00:47:12 CHRISTINE

Do you think it's important to read authors books in the order that they’re writing?

00:47:14 SARAH

If I'm interested in the author, then I prefer to because I like to sort of understand their journey a little bit. But no, not in general. Only if I am really interested in the author themselves, yeah.

With her, I don’t have a choice, unless I want to wait for like thirty years [laughs]

00:47:32 CHRISTINE

Yeah, read what comes out next. I read book by Banana Yoshimoto a long time ago called Kitchen and it was one of my first books by Japanese authors that I wrote and it had - it was full of a quirkiness that I recall. It's been a long time since I read it. That was kind of my introduction to Japanese authors. I picked it up at a thrift store. I think we should mention those as a place where you find the book that isn't being pushed by the publishers, but it's just there.

00:48:08 SARAH

We've also both read Sayaka Murata's books this year. Yes. Sorry. Earthlings and Convenience Store Woman. I loved them both.

00:48:14 CHRISTINE

Yeah, mind bending yeah brilliant because they were mind bending yeah, yeah, thoroughly enjoyable.

00:48:23 SARAH

Yeah, I love her stuff, Convenience Store Woman I guess I enjoyed slightly more, but I just love her.

00:48:28 CHRISTINE

I liked it significantly more. They’re both the quirky and dark. What's next on your list?

00:48:34 SARAH

India. Loads of Indian writers. What I want to mention is that I think is a very underrated novel, and it’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara. Sarah and I both read last year, I think it was actually nominated for the Women’s Prize, longlisted but it just got nothing, basically. I thought it was fantastic. It's about a boy in the north of India whose sister goes missing and he is looking for her and they live on the purple line in in Delhi. So it's referring to the metro line.

And it’s about djinn, so it's got some like I guess folklore in there and he's just like running around markets. It's kind of a like a detective story I guess like obviously she's missing, so that's quite serious, but it hasn't got that like dark tone, if you know what I mean, it's a little bit maybe slightly more way or something like that, because he's very young and he's like “I can find her!”

And of course, as an adult reader you read through the lines and sort of understand a bit more about what's happening, but it's not a like dark, yeah, evil sort of book, and I just loved it. It totally immersive.

Deepa Anappara writes these scenes where he's like running through the markets and stuff and he's playing with his friends and he's knocking things over and he's getting yelled at by the people who are trying to sell stuff.

And it's just like it - you really feel like you're there.

00:49:48 CHRISTINE

Sounds delightful. Because you did talk about a book that's for kids I have to - I'm going to come back to Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. I think a lot of his work is not great.

00:49:53 SARAH

[laughs] Don’t tell Kieran!

00:49:58 CHRISTINE

No, I mean that there are a number of books that I think are brilliant. I think I've read almost everything he published up into the last 10 years, probably stopped at his biography – his autobiography, very auto.

But Haroun and the Sea of Stories I think is a work of beauty and wonder. It's very cool.

00:50:17 SARAH

Yeah, it's like Salmon Rushdie does Alice in Wonderland or something.

00:50:22 CHRISTINE

Yeah, it is. It reminds me The Phantom Tollbooth. It's just that level of everything has three meanings.

00:50:31 SARAH

It's very multi ages as well, like you could give it to your kids, they would enjoy it. But yeah, I could feel that it was something he written for children, but as I was reading it I was like I think I don't understand what he's doing here. He's just going above my head.

00:50:46 CHRISTINE

It’s complex.

Jhumpa Lahiri. Who is brilliant and particularly interesting. Wrote In Other Words which she wrote in Italian because she went to learn, went to Italy and wanted to learn Italian.

So she wrote it in Italian and had it translated by someone else into English. And as people who live in two languages, it's really, really fascinating to read about her experience and her drive and her, why and how that came about.

00:51:14 SARAH

She has a new one, Whereabouts which came out recently and this one she also wrote in Italian and then she translated it herself.

00:51:23 CHRISTINE

The Bookcast Club

#49 Reading More Asian Authors

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