I never really had the time to read during the school year, so over this past four years I’ve been consolidating a list of books that I’ve been wanting to read. I figure a lot of you guys are looking for new reading material too, so I want to offer my general commentary on the following.
There is a sort of theme going on with the books I chose to review here, The Rape of Nanking and The China Mirage are both non-fiction concerning WWII and post-WWII China, and Shelter is a novel with a Korean-American main character reconciling his current mess of a life with his upbringing as an Korean-American.
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang
Growing up I’ve always heard from my parents that China hated Japan because Japan invaded China during WWII. The conversation never really went much into detail besides that. It also never felt personal, my parents did their PhDs in Japan, my dad always gushed about Japanese manufacturing, I grew up with lots of Japanese pop-culture influences like manga and music. But given the fact that I am a Chinese-American that has visited and lived in Japan numerous times I felt like I had an obligation to try to understand this history.
The Rape of Nanking describes the event of Japanese invasion and occupation of Nanking which was the capital of Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China. Iris breaks down the novel into before, during, and after the occupation from the Chinese, Foreign, and Japanese point of view. It’s kind of hard to describe the magnitude of this massacre,but it would not be a stretch to say that it was comparable to the holocaust, if not even more brutal, concentrated in a smaller area, over a much shorter period of time (the book makes this comparison). Despite this I don’t remember learning about the Nanking Massacre in school, maybe partly due to the Western-centric lens the American school system uses, but also Iris describes a huge cover up by not only the Japanese government, but also the American government in trying to rebuild Japan as a Asian ally after Mao Zedong’s communist government took over China shortly after the end of WWII.
Verdict:
It was a really good read, organized in a way that makes the information extremely easy to parse. I recommend this book for people who want to be more educated about a terrible part of history that has been largely relegated to a single line in textbooks, for people who want to learn more about Chinese-Japanese relations, and for people like me who want to understand a little more about their Chinese roots.
Shelter by Jung Yun
Most books I read aren’t really about people like me, there’s something about growing up Asian-American that is different from how main characters in most novels go about their lives. Shelter is about a Korean-American guy who get’s his life flipped upside down when his mom stumbles into his backyard naked, disheveled, and distressed. Throughout the book he is forced to his strict Korean upbringing and examine his relationship with his parents. It has Asian-American themes but even without that it’s a solid novel that gets you hooked pretty quickly and has decent pacing throughout with no lulls. I would tell you more but then I’d be spoiling the plot...
Verdict:
I liked the novel despite fiction not usually being my cup of tea. I was really impressed by Jung’s mastery at describing people, actions, and the setting (I have no good words to describe how good she is at describing). I recommend this for people who enjoy fast paced melodramatic stories, and other Asians who want to read something where they’re better represented.
The China Mirage by James Bradley
I feel like media portrayal of China in my lifetime has always been on the negative side, which was why I was really surprised finding out that in the early 1900s Americans loved China. Not real Chinese people who were the only ethnic group targeted by official legislature (The Chinese Exclusion Act) to be deported and kept from immigrating to the U.S., but a dreamy ideal of a far off Chinese peasant that longed to be westernized and converted to Christianity by their American saviors. It starts with America’s history with China starting from the Opium wars where Western drug dealers illegally smuggled Opium into China in order to turn a huge profit from getting Chinese people addicted to the drug while simultaneously bringing China’s riches (tea, silk, porcelain, etc) to the Western world. It then covers America’s leaders funneling millions of dollars in support of Chiang Kai-shek’s failing Republic of China due to the perpetuation of “New China” with its Christian Chinese population via ignorant propagandists (like Henry Luce of Time Magazine) who never set foot in China. And finally it covers post war communist China, the red scare, and the Korean and Vietnam wars, with commentary on how U.S. and China relationships got so bad.
This book really helped me understand why America and Chinese relations are so terrible, why China is always portrayed as the bad guy in the media, and where general anti-Chinese sentiments have grown from. It has changed my views on Mao Zedong and communist China who earned the trust of the Chinese peasants, offered them better lives, and improved the state of China at the time (though I don’t know enough to judge about his later rule and the cultural revolution).
Verdict:
I did find it on the longer side, especially the middle section where they were talking about FDR’s secret air force in China, I ended up skipping two or three chapters there. But it was still extremely enlightening read, and I recommend it for people interested in U.S.-China Relations, understanding why China became communist, and understanding why the U.S. got involved in Korea and lost in Vietnam.
