[568] Argo – Antonio Mendez and Matt Baglio

” Any good surveillance detection run, or DSR, always begins with the assumption that the hostiles, whoever they may be, are everywhere, and watching. ” (Ch.6, p.111)

On November 4, 1979, backed by the government, Iranian student-militants stormed the American embassy in Tehran and held dozens of Americans in hostage. The situation was dire, unbearably tense. About three months after the takeover of the embassy, six American diplomats who had secretly escaped the compound were attempting to flee the country that seethed with hatred for Westerners, who they saw as liars, spies, and obstacles to the Islamic Revolution.

How could the president stand by and do nothing while sixty-six Americans were in danger? There was no shortage of critics, including political foes of Carter who used the moment to score points by decrying him as weak and ineffective. (Ch.3, p.47)

Argo recounts how CIA and Canada hid and then sneaked the six diplomats out of Iran before the militants realized they were unaccounted for in the hostage crisis. Much of the planning and execution of the escape fell to Antonio Mendez, a top-level CIA officer who specializes in forging, authenticating, and maintaining aliases and covers for clandestine operations. With the American diplomats holding out in two safe houses—specifically, the residences of Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor and diplomat John Sheardown—the rescue effort faced a ticking clock.

Hollywood film crews were typically made up of people from all over the world. And of all the groups heading to Iran, it wasn’t implausible to imagine a group of self-absorbed Hollywood eccentrics traveling there in the middle of a revolution to find the perfect locations for their movie. (Ch.9, p.172)

Much of Argo is about Mendez’s preparation to pull off this charade that would rescue the six American diplomats out of Iran. He came up with a seemingly preposterous but surprisingly plausible idea that went against the standard practice of crafting mundane, unassuming cover identities. Recruiting the help of a Hollywood Academy Award-winning makeup artist, Mendez would disguise the six diplomats as a film production crew scouting for a sci-fi film location, complete with backstopped stories for each diplomat and their alias documents. To make the cover story plausible, Mendez created a fake movie and production company, printed business cards, took out film ads and held a party at a Los Angeles nightclub.

What I didn’t know was that the Canadians had been working on the problem of the passports for quite some time. From the day that the houseguests had come under their care, I think the Canadians realized the logic of allowing them to use Canadian documentation. (Ch.8, p.152)

The book emphasizes on the Canadians’ crucial role in making this landmark operation a success. To even Mendez’s astonishment, Canadian government had quickly bypassed the necessary council hearing and granted fake Canadian passports to the American diplomats. Every page of Argo breathes tension and raises pulse rate, since the Iranian revolutionaries had suspended all conventions and rationality. The loosely-adapted film inevitably steals the limelight, but the book, less dramatic but more detailed in the step-by-step elements contributing to the rescue, is more insightful to the nature of the operation. The book shows how the success on this rescue hinges on the smallest of details and intricate thinking. It also gives you a historical and political background of Iran in the 20th century. Argo shows how truth is stranger than fiction.

310 pp. Penguin. Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

Asian Literature

Musing Mondays asks you to muse about:
Tell us what book(s) you recently bought for yourself or someone else, and why you chose that/those book(s).

I have always been fascinated by Southeast Asia and its history. Having traveled through Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, I have developed an awareness for the politics and economic progress for the region. What fascinates me even more, of course, is the literature from this region. Except for Thailand, all the countries in this region had at one point been colonized and stricken by internal warfare, so you can only conceive the richness of history and humanity as well as the important role literature plays to express humanity. In places where people are suppressed literature often gives people a voice and coveys the quality of life. The most recent purchase, from Barnes and Noble, to my surprise, is set in the Khmer Rouge killing fields of 1970s Cambodia. It brings awareness of the UN-backed tribunal on Pol Pot’s genocide. Cambodia’s wounds are absolutely fresh and raw: the bones of the dead still work their way to the surface. The Disappeared by Kim Echlin is first and foremost a love story, but the core of it reveals Cambodia to be a mortuary world whose survivors endure continuing chaos, violence, want and corruption. Horror is normal, the heinous ordinary: the Khmer regime deliberately erased the piety of family, culture, religion and memory itself.

Tell us what you’re reading right now — what you think of it, so far; why you chose it; what you are (or, aren’t) enjoying it.

I’m reading the last 100 pages of Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng, a gripping and poignant of her courage and fortitude during the Chinese Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1973. An employee of Shell Oil and the widow of an official of Chiang Kai-Shek’s regime, she immediately became a target of political renouncement. Accused of being the spy for British imperialist, she was placed in solitary confinement, where she would remain for more than six years. Honestly I don’t enjoy reading about Cheng’s sufferings and injustice, but her uncompromising spirit and courage make the book very powerful. While she is recounting great chunks of the last 40 years of China’s history, she brings people and places to life.

Endorse Reading

Guardian UK reports that the number of children reading for fun has declined since 2005. The proportion of children reading for pleasure has declined as their time is crowded with other activities, and more than a fifth never read in their own time. This is the UK stat, I wonder what the number would be in the United States? School days are shorter here, and children seem to spend more time watching TV and playing video game.

My youngest aunt taught me to read (mostly English). She was a school teacher back in Hong Kong. She was appalled, when she was young and I was younger, that she could read and I couldn’t. So she took my education into her own hands (my parents worked 9-to-5 jobs), sitting me down and making sure I was paying attention while she carefully drew letters on a little chalkboard, sounding out words for me, writing up vocabulary lists. Best of all, she would read to me: Beatrix Potter, Dr. Seuss, Richard Scarry, Beverly Cleary. I was barely four, and pre-school was a concept unheard of.

At first, I think, I loved the materteral attention as much as I loved the books themselves. But gradually, the books grew on me, and before long I was devouring them on my own. I’m forever indebted to my aunt for imparting in me the love of reading. As a teenager, I was an undiscriminating reader, blissfully unaware of the lines between high culture and low (maybe except for romance). I read it all: classic works of the western and eastern canon, pulpy novelization of disasters, paperback collections of detective stories.

[499] Time Was Soft There: A Memoir. A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. – Jeremy Mercer

” I think back to what George said about the bookstore being an annex to Notre Dame and I think it is very true. In the end, yes, it is a famous bookstore and, yes, it is of no small literary importance. But more than anything, Shakespeare and Company is a refuge, like the church across the river. A place where the owner allows everyone to take what they need and give what they can. ” (Afterword, p.258)

The circumstances that led to Jeremy Mercer’s, a criminal journalist from Ottawa, fleeing his home read like fiction: a thief whose exploits he wrote about issued a death threat that dislodged him from home and forced him to reevaluate his life. Down and out in Paris, a casual stop at the legendary Shakespeare and Company Bookstore proves to be the beginning of a life-changing experience, which Mercer fondly documents in this memoir.

Since arriving at Shakespeare and Company, I’d graced a privileged rung of George’s informal hierarchy. I’d been given the keys, I’d been invited upstairs for dinner, I was his chosen confidant when he wanted to talk about buying the apartment, the future of the bookstore, or the love he had for his lost daughter. (Ch.29, p.185)

As much as Mercer tries to accept the general chaos and uncertainty of the store, he cannot be more grateful for the kindness of George Whitman, who allows him to work at the bookstore in exchange for a room. Modeled after Sylvia Beach’s original bookstore of the same name, which had become the hub for a generation of American and British writers in Paris but closed during World War II, George Whitman’s Shakespeare and Company in the Left Bank has been a haven for poor artists and aspiring writers to alive and work for over forty years. So long as residents fulfill his obligation to keep the store for an hour a day and fulfill George’s ordinance of daily reading, they can live for free.

Here we were, a group of virtual strangers, running the famous Shakespeare and Company. Personally, I’d known the man for forty-eight hours and yet I had the keys to both his bookstore and his bedroom in my pocket. Coming from a life of police bulletins and home security systems, such trust seemed almost folly. (Ch.14, p.89)

Mercer’s stay at the bookstore epitomizes the bohemian lifestyle—roaming Paris, bumming food, writing and reading. On top of the strange but warm camaraderie with the other residents, Mercer describes his developing relationship with Whitman in details. The frugal owner who often misplaces his money and leaves bills between pages of books would make breakfast for his transients. A true bibliophile who values books more than money, he has been an inspiration to his guests, despite his struggle to preserve the legacy of his bookstore. To Mercer’s fond memories, George Whitman is bumbling along in this world of his dreams, trying to do his best without any grip on reality.

Time at Shakespeare and Company was as soft as anything I’d ever felt. (Ch.26, p.169)

As much as I live vicariously through Mercer’s adventure, I come to learn about George Whitman and his amazing life devoted to books. Time Was Soft There evokes that lost generation of writers and artists that find haven in Paris. Reading the book offers a glimpse of the magic this literary establishment has brought to those who have been part of it. He does not write like Hemingway, but he does capture the elusive quality that makes Paris the mecca it is for dreamers and romantics.

260 pp. Picador. Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

[457] A Year in Provence – Peter Mayle

” The people who work on the land are more likely to eat well at noon and sparingly in the evening, a habit that is healthy and sensible and, for us, quite impossible. We have found that there is nothing like a good lunch to give us an appetite for dinner. It’s alarming. It must have something to do with the novelty of living in the middle of such abundance of good things to eat, and among men and women whose interest in food verges on obsession. ” (January, p.15)

And that I can only live vicariously through Mayle’s gastronomic experience with my eyes—how can I be not feeling hungry and drooling over the pages? In 1990, without much hesitation upon hunting down a house, Peter Mayle and his wife packed off to the balmy south of France—for good, kissing goodbye to the dreadful food and impenetrable cloud of England. Beginning, appropriately enough, on New Year’s Day with a divine luncheon in a quaint restaurant, he sets the scene and pits his British sensibilities against it. Though retreating in contempt of his national cuisine, Mayle seems unfazed—and that certainly helps him assimilate to living in France, where food is treated with more than obsession, fastidiousness.

[Monsieur Bangnols] had once been in England, and had eaten roast lamb at a hotel in Liverpool. It had been gray and tepid and tasteless. But of course, he said, it is well known that the English kill their lamb twice; once when they slaughter it, and once when they cook it. (January, p.17)

Mayle describes in loveng detail the charming, 200-year-old farmhouse at the base of the Lubéron Mountain, its thick stone walls and well-tended vines, its wine caves and wells, its shade trees and swimming pool, and, on a negative note, its lack of central heating and a modern toilet. He describes the ruddy local culture from an Englishman’s perspective as he fixes up the house and adopts the Côtes du Rhône region as his new home. His full expectation of living la dolce vita meets with some unforeseen obstacles, as he becomes embroiled in a series of (minor) catastrophes (e.g. a tabletop cut out of a slab of marble got frozen) and frustrations that require him and his wife to reshape their entire characters and perform some serious attitude adjustment. For once, time perates in a different dimension—often contemplated in terms of seasons, rather than hours and weeks. Then comes the annoyance of thick-skinned visitors who outstay their welcome and the tourists who picnic inside private territory.

One of the characteristics which we liked and even admired about the French is their willingness to support good cooking, no matter how remote the kitchen may be. The quality of the food is more important than convenience, and they will happily drive for an hour or more, salivating en route, in order to eat well. (May, p.94)

Although the transition to living in Provence is not the smoothest for the Mayles, and that everybody in the region has strong opinion about everything, the Provençales all agree on the importance of food. This book captures the first year of Mayles’ life in Provence, but also a food diary as they discover local, out-of-the-way quaint restaurants undertaken by old madames. What is better than learning a culture through its culinary art and gastronomic particulars? Mayle notes that the French spend as much of their income on their stomachs as the English do on their cars. His gourmet forays encompass rabbit pâté, lamb, fox, seafood, truffle, olive oil, and a variety of bread made to accompany specific dishes. This book really captures Provence from the inside, as he pokes gentle fun at the locals for whom he has developed a warm attachment.

208 pp. Vintage Departure Series. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

Author in the House

Crouching tiger, hidden dragon among us. Neither does she bare her teeth like a tiger nor is she bestowed with power a dragon in Chinese mythology. She is Ruthanne Lum McCunn, author of God of Luck, a novel about coolie trade in Peru, which was gifted to me by the author herself. Speaking fluent Cantonese with perfect tones (each Cantonese sound has 9 tones that in many cases distinguish the meanings of characters), Ruthanne puts many of us in shame, as we Chinese manage only with some sort of pidgin English with smatterings of Chinese words. For a long time she’s known as the American lady who speaks perfect Chinese and with whom we exchange stories of growing up in Hong Kong. Often a lighthearted question would lead to a very facetious reply. She’s totally amiable and kind. In fragments of conversations over months Ruthanne let on more biographical information than I can imagine.

Ruthanne Lum McCunn is an Eurasian of Chinese and Scottish descent. Born in 1946 in San Francisco’s Chinatown, she grew up in Hong Kong, where she was educated first in Chinese and then British schools. In 1962 she returned to the U.S. to attend college. Her grandmother was Chinese, thus the linguistic and cultural root planted in her. I cherished talking with her, and listening to her reflections on Hong Kong before my time. If you just listen to her talk alone, you would never realize she’s Eurasian. She talks like locals, using colloquial expressions and slang. It’s just wonderful to discover a published author among the coffee shop clientele—who speaks your native language! Is there a better way to start the new year with an autographed book from the author herself?

The Year in Life

Despite a broken limb and a stolen wallet, 2011 is a good year for me compared to the world. Walking out of the shadow of emotional turmoil.

January

• The blog turned 5. I could believe I had been writing for that long, let alone an awesome group of followers/readers. Now 6th anniversary is coming up.
• Participated in Independent Literary Award.
• Started a new job with a slightly lower pay, but I have made the right decision because it’s where I belong.

February

• After being stricken by eczema/scaly skin for a year, doctor suggested a change of diet. The benefit of gluten-free diet is two-fold: much improved skin and weight loss.
• First words of Borders going under. Scoured the store for bargains.

March

• Spent the whole paycheck on Japan post-earthquake relief.
• Lambda Literary Award month.

April

• Discovered Wallace Stegner who is the author of a favorite read of 2011.
• SFO Terminal 2 open house.
• Participated Chinese Literature Challenge and managed to finish in 2 months.

June

• Trip to Paris for two weeks.
• After almost 20 years, I finally read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Finished it in Paris.
• iPad arrived. Read a small of books on the electronic device; but still haven’t got an iPhone. Maybe iPhone 5?

July

• Another landmark in reading: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.
• Skipped the 4th of July celebration.
• My cousin Fiona got married—and for the first time I realized I’m getting old!

August

• Began The Divine Comedy but have yet to finish.
• Participated 30 Day Book Meme.
• Started a new exercise regime to work toward 100 pushup goal.
• Internal promotion at work.

September

• Wrote a series of posts for Book Blogger Appreciation Week: On sense of community, on finding a niche in the community, on habit change, and on secrets to success.
• Inspired by the trip to France, signed up to study French, and passed with flying color three months later. Second course in spring.
• Re-connected with hordes of elementary school friends on Facebook.

October

• Alan Hollinghurst published his first novel since 2004.
• 8 months since going gluten-free, weight drops to 148. Pant size 29. A friend said I looked anorexic. It’s time to head back to the gym to do some weight-training, which I haven’t had a chance to.

November

• Trip to Dallas (Texas for the first time) and reconnected with someone I haven’t seen for 4 years. The beautiful and serene Dallas Arboretum made a fond impression on me.
• OccupyXX campaign hits the campus, inducing violence and gunshot. Dismissed early from work.
• Attended Dickens Christmas Fair. That was heaps of fun.
• Celebrated my 36th birthday. Instead of a party, had dinner with individual friends.
• Trip to Palm Springs.

December

• Skipping Christmas.
• Trip to Las Vegas to see Sandy Lam in Concert.
• Saw Sandy Lam live again in San Francisco.
• Finished the most difficult book ever, The Sound and the Fury, other than Ulysses.

[406] A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway

” There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy. ” (from There is Never Any End to Paris, 209)

After World War I Hemingway settled in Paris as a correspondent for the Toronto Star. Later he quit the job as a journalist of his own accord to pursue serious writing—meaning he also forfeited a stable income. A Moveable Feast, savagely written and vividly intuitive, is an astonishing, painstakingly candid personal story of a man who dared to be completely honest, of both the people he knew and of his dedication to writing. It brings alive Paris in the 1920s, as Hemingway’s literary life, albeit thrifty and austere, takes him to famous establishments and homes of some well-known literati.

It was in that room too that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day . . . Going down the stairs when I worked well, and that needed luck as well as discipline, was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris. (from Miss Stein Instructs, 13)

Hemingway does not make a secret of his being poor, nor does he feel ashamed of it, for poverty was almost everywhere and by which people live at that time. Small economy seems to be the norm in Paris, then, one could live very well on almost nothing and by skipping meals occasionally and never buying any new clothes, luxuries could be afforded every once in a while. He derives pleasure from frugality, deeming hunger as discipline. But he is protective of his wife’s feeling, hiding his hunger from her. A walk from his flat above a sawmill and through Jardin du Luxembourg into St. Sulpice, devoid of any restaurants and boulangerie, is the best way to curb hunger and cravings. By the time he works his way through the quiet alleys in St. Germain-des-Pres and reaches Shakespeare & Co., his hunger is contained. New books on display heightens his perceptions. As a member of the bookstore’s rental library, Sylvia Beach, the owner, allows him to take as many books as he wants with no expiration.

But when he was drunk he would usually come to find me and, drunk, he took almost as much pleasure interfering with my work as Zelda did interfering with his. This continued for years but, for years too, I had no more loyal friend than Scott when he was sober. (from Hawks Do Not Share, 182)

As protective of his private writing time as Hemingway claims (he would avoid his “office” at Cloerie de Lilas lest to be disrupted by society), he makes generous allowance for Scott Fitzgerald, who confides in him his marriage problems and book projects. Choked by the vicious cycle that begins and ends with drunkenness, with sobering, working, and fighting with Zelda in between, Fitzgerald struggles to write after The Great Gatsby, which was huge hit was critics but not sales. The substantial coverage on Fitzgerald in A Moveable feast is a testimony to the depth of their friendship. Fitzgerald’s marriage unfortunately also becomes an antithesis to what Hemingway and Hadley share in theirs—joy, happiness, and content despite financial hardship. It’s priceless to follow the heart’s pursuit.

A Moveable Feast is evocative of that lost generation of artists living in 1920s Paris: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound (who set a fund to rescue T.S. Eliot out of his bank job in order to write poetry), Pablo Picasso, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce. Hemingway truly captures that intensity and immediacy of youth and love, doing what his heart craves, with biding interest. I’m living vicariously through Hemingway’s Paris. The mood that Paris creates affects those who visit today as it did in Hemingway’s time.

209 pp. Softcover. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

[339] Diamond Hill – Chi-shun Feng

” Nobody knew why it was called Diamond Hill. There were certainly no diamond mines, nor diamonds on anyone’s fingers. ‘Diamond’ in Chinese can also mean excavation of stones and slate. It felt like a sick joke on the thousands of people there struggling to survive in poverty. ” [15]

A big thank you to my friend R for sending this thoughtful book, which is published by a local press in Hong Kong. Diamond Hill is a residential neighborhood in Hong Kong. I remember posing the same question to my mother when she took me to visit my grandmother’s distant relatives. That was 1970s. Feng’s family moved to Diamond Hill in 1956, when huge influx of immigrants from mainland arrived in the British colony. Everybody was an immigrant, Feng recalls, not so much the difference in ethnicity but the dialects spoken. The memoir of a native son of a Kowloon-side squatter village presents the early days of a life shaped by a now-extinct community.

Hong Kong in the 50s and 60s was a city of dirt-poor refugees, who had fled post-war hardship or communist rule in Mainland China. A minority were luckier and brought with them wealth and business know-how. And in the case of the garment industry owners, expensive machinery was transferred from big cities in China such as Shanghai to restart the business in Hong Kong. [42]

Despite the financial and commerce hub that it is now, upbringing of the generation that is responsible for the success of the city was not so rosy. Most people inhabit in houses built in a random fashion: legal ones built of bricks and mortar, and illegal shanty huts built in spaces between. The latter was especially susceptible to fire, which destroyed half of the Diamond Hill neighborhood in 1960s. To accommodate the victims, the government launched what has been known as the largest public housing project in the world.

Yesterday the news reported that Hong Kong housing cost tops the world, with the average price of an apartment being 11 times the average annual income. The picture Feng paints is certainly at loggerhead to what the city is now. The harsh but colorful world in which Feng grew up—the makeshift eating dives called dai pai dongs, kite flying, the pawn shops, the firecrackers—is no more, and the great value of Diamond Hill is that his story is also, in large part, the story of Hong Kong. Once upon a time, Hong Kong itself, its British colonial rulers and Chinese elite aside, was one big squatter village that transformed into a manufacturing mecca and then again into the financial center that it is today.

There were many shops down the road which tempted me. For breakfast, they sold congee and yauh ja gwai, a fried dough stick which you could split into two long pieces by pulling them apart in the middle. They still sell the thing today, but it is pre-cooked and soggy. Back then it was deep-fried in front of our eyes, and it was quite a spectacle. [79]

We seldom ate out, and if we did, there was coaching from the parents as to what to do to order and how to behave. Going to a tea house for dim sum was usually on a Sunday around noon, and it was quite an ordeal because every other family seemed to have the same agenda and scrambling for an open table could take hours. The usual practice, uncouth as it might have been, was to stand and wait beside some strangers’ table and stare at them eating until they called for the tab and quit. [86]

So right, and that was the reason I never missed having dim sum when I was a kid. That scrambling for table was dreadful! Food is a powerful trip down memory lane because it possesses that power of association. Ever wonder why something no longer tastes the same as when we ate it as kids? It seems to be the case for everything. While Feng doesn’t miss the shanty huts he grew up in, gone along the old Hong KOng were irreplaceable memories and nostalgia. In the British colonial government and Chinese’s collective rush to turn Hong Kong into Asia’s “world city” (official slogan), officials have torn down history and paved over the collective memory of its citizens. This book is a must read for those who learn about history of Hong Kong from a native’s perspective. This memoir evokes and mirrors that of Martin Booth’s who penned Gweilo: A Memoir of a Hong Kong Childhood. Like Booth’s the book is full of color and packed with incident, and is evocative of the noise and bustle of Hong Kong half a century ago, but more edgier in style.

198 pp. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

Gratitude

It’s Thanksgiving here in the United States so …
What authors and books are you most thankful for?

Happy Thanksgiving! This question makes me ponder if there is a difference between favorite authors and authors for whom I’m grateful. There are authors whose works ratify my existence as a human being (sexual orientation and self esteem): James Baldwin, E.M. Forster, and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are authors whose entire oeuvre doesn’t impress me but single work just speaks to me: Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) and L.P. Hartley (The Go-Between) and Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita). There are authors whose writing style I imitate: W. Somerset Maugham and Deirdre Madden. There are authors whose works just make me think and de-mystify: Toni Morrison and Jorge Luis Borges. There are authors whose works I read for pure pleasure: Daphne du Maurier and Agatha Christie. So many books and authors. I’m just grateful for books that are actually books. Not only are they literary nourishment, they also provide consolation when I feel lonely.