Books Set in Asia: Vietnam

Build Your House Around My Body, by Violet Kupersmith (2021)

 

This novel defies description.  The novel mainly focuses on Winnie, a young Vietnamese-American woman, who moved to Saigon ostensibly to teach English and to connect with her Vietnamese heritage.  She is very unhappy and drowns herself in beer and sex.  We know from the first page that she will disappear without a trace.

 

The novel seamless moves from the present to the past and back again, through French colonization to the Japanese coup in the 1940s, with brief references to the Vietnamese War.  We meet a marvelous assortment of odd characters, from a Khmer-French schoolboy who was left in a rubber plantation in the 1940s, to the Fortune Teller, to the brothers Tan and Long, to the young Binh, who disappeared decades before Winnie. Interwove through these characters is the supernatural and superstitions inherent in rural Vietnamese culture.

 

The author slowly peels away the layers, and slowly the connections between all these characters becomes evident.

 

This book won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I absolutely loved it.

 

Read:  January b28, 2023

 

5 Stars

Books Set in Asia: Bangkok, Thailand

Bangkok Wakes to Rain, by Pitchaya Sudbanthad (2019)

 

Bangkok Wakes to Rain is a series of interconnected vignettes that take place mostly in Bangkok, Thailand.  The stories go back and forth in time from the late 1800s to the present day.  One story line follows Phineas Stevens, an American missionary doctor who initially feels lost in a culture he does not understand.  Then there is Sammy, son of a Thai mother and British father.  When his parents divorce, he goes to live with his father and new wife in England.  His mother retains the family estate in Bangkok.  When the house becomes too much for her to manage, she contemplates converting it into condos.

 

On one of his visits to see his mother in Bangkok, Sammy begins a relationship with Nee.  As a university student in the 1970s, she participated in the government protests.  She was traumatized by the military’s shooting of the student demonstrators.  Her sister, Nok, had left Thailand and became a restauranteur.  She served authentic Thai food.  One of her patrons was a Thai military officer who was actively behind some of the protests of the 1970s.  This puts her at odds with her sister.

 

There are many other quirky characters, each with his or her own views and experiences of living in Thailand’s bustling city of Bangkok.  The stories slowly weave together a picture of Thailand and Bangkok throughout the last century.

 

Read:  September 20, 2022

 

3.5 Stars