China – Susan Blumberg-Kason

Afternoons with Christina Matula

September 18, 2018 By Susan Blumberg-Kason Leave a Comment

I first met Christina Matula four years ago in Hong Kong and bonded with her over books, publishing, and Hong Kong. Every year I return to Hong Kong, we meet up and it’s always one of the highlights of my visits. Now Christina is on tour with her new picture book, The Shadow in the Moon (Charlesbridge, 2018), and visited Chicago for quite a few events. I was so excited to meet up with her at a couple of them.

On Sunday, she read from her book at the Hyde Park Children’s Book Fair and taught young readers to make paper Chinese lanterns, just in time for the Mid-Autumn Festival next week. Christina read from the storytelling stage and amazed the crowds with the cutest rabbit lantern and mooncake, peach, persimmon, and pomelo squishies.

And today she visited my youngest son’s school and boy was he starstruck to know the author presenting to the whole school. She spoke about the holiday and her book with the younger grades and more about her writing process with the older ones. Most of the students–and teachers–hadn’t heard of the fruit people eat during the Mid-Autumn Fest, so that was a great treat.

It’s not everyday I have the opportunity to spend so much time with a friend on her book tour, so this was really a treat and a great chance to catch up before she moved on to her next stop–New York.

Book of the week—White Chrysanthemum

June 25, 2018 By Susan Blumberg-Kason Leave a Comment

Today I finished this difficult, yet critical novel set during WWII and recent times. White Chrysanthemum (Putnam, 2018) by Mary Lynn Bracht tells the story of Emi and Hana, two Korean sisters who grew up on Jeju Island, just south of Korea. Their mother and their mother’s mother and women going back generations in their family had been divers who were able to support themselves from the seafood they harvested and sold at the markets. But one day a Japanese soldier came for 9 year old Emi, and 16 year old Hana offered herself to save her sister (hidden behind some large rocks).

What happened to Hana is horrifying. It was hard for me to read and I’m a WWII history nut who has read about the Rape of Nanking and the comfort women and the Holocaust. And it’s still hard to read. There’s a line in the book that stayed with me for the rest of the story and even now: All wars are crimes against the world’s women and girls. If you don’t understand that now, you will after reading this book.

Hana was taken to a building in Manchuria, which is northeast China now and had been run by Russia for a while and was taken by the Japanese in the early 1930s. So when Hana went up to Manchuria, it was to become a “comfort woman” for Japanese soldiers. I hate the term “comfort women” because it softens what was really going on. These girls and women were trafficked into sex slavery and there was nothing comfortable about it. It was rape, over and over and over again.

But back to the story. Emi herself didn’t fare very well even though she was saved from the Japanese. After WWII, her father was murdered just before the Korean War started because he was viewed as a communist for no reason other than he wasn’t originally from Jeju Island. At the age of 14, Emi was forced to marry a southern policeman to purify the south and make sure there weren’t communist sympathizers on Jeju. Emi had two children who were in their late 50s and early 60s when we meet them in the book. They knew nothing of their mother’s past and had no idea they had an aunt.

Bracht is a beautiful writer and tells this story in alternating voices between Emi and Hana. She doesn’t sugar coat anything about the history and what’s going on now. For instance, in 2015, Japan and South Korea came to an “agreement” where a statue honoring the Korean women trafficked into slavery was removed from an area near the Japanese embassy in Seoul. Removing the statue was a compromise so the Japanese could save a little face before looking into this part of the war. But almost three years have passed and nothing at all has been done. And because this is being erased and not taught in history books, we don’t know how many Korean women fell victim to sex slavery. Bracht writes that 50,000 to 200,000 women were trafficked into sex slavery, but nothing was said of this until the early 1990s when women started speaking up. Today there are less than 50 survivors still alive.

White Chrysanthemum is an important book and one that needs to be read by men and women. As Bracht says in her author’s note at the end, if we don’t learn about and recognize this history, we are bound to repeat it again as we have around the world since WWII. All wars are crimes against the world’s women and girls.

An evening with Spencer Wise

June 12, 2018 By Susan Blumberg-Kason 1 Comment

Months ago some friends in Hong Kong were tweeting with Spencer Wise about his forthcoming debut novel, The Emperor of Shoes (Hanover Square Press, 2018) and I not-so-graciously chimed in and tweeted that I needed to read his book, too. Set in the southern Chinese city of Foshan at a shoe factory, the novel tells the story of a Jewish man from Boston and a Chinese female activist and what happens when family and ethics don’t match up.

The Emperor of Shoes came out last week and tonight Spencer read at the gorgeous Lake Forest Book Store. When I was growing up, Lake Forest was like the be-all and end-all, so it was really great going back there this evening. I’d been to another event or two at the book store, but years ago and one was held at a neighboring restaurant.

Spencer started out by reading from his book, which set the tone for the discussion that followed. His family has been shoe makers going back five generations before they fled pogroms in Russia. His father has lived all over the world, including decades in China, overseeing shoe factories. Nothing about this story is auto-biographical, which has seemed to confuse some reviewers. I guess some authors get more of this than others. Why do readers assume some novels are in fact autobiographical while they wouldn’t think that of other novels? Perhaps it just means the former are so compelling that readers think the stories must be true.

We had a nice discussion about the shoe business and learned that shoes cannot be made by machines or robots and have to be hand-made. Each shoe takes 150 steps, no matter the style. And shoes are expensive to make because they are so labor intensive, so places like China are now too expensive to produce shoes because the workers are joining the middle class and are demanding more in wages and benefits.

This is what capitalism is all about. When we wear clothes made in China or Vietnam or Bangladesh, we rarely (or at least I don’t) think about the workers who make my clothes or shoes and under what kind of conditions they’re toiling. Wise’s book gives us all something to think about. (I do think about cell phone laborers because that’s been in the news a lot more than apparel factories.)

Spencer’s novel is great and gives us all a lot of questions to ask ourselves. After the reading, when he was signing books, we talked about the perfect summer beach read and how some people look for grocery store paperbacks. But I think this really is a perfect summer novel. It’s smart, sassy, easy to read, and will impress all your friends at the pool.

Second year of Chinese lessons, then and and now

May 27, 2018 By Susan Blumberg-Kason Leave a Comment

My older son just finished his second year of college Chinese and was showing his young siblings his textbook because they, too, are learning Mandarin, but at a slower pace. The little ones could understand come characters here and there, which was rewarding after several years of weekly Mandarin that I’m “strongly encouraging” them to take.

And it got me thinking about my second year of Chinese when I was in college. This is one of the books I used:

Jake’s is obviously much more attractive and appealing than the one I used. From his textbook’s cover, one can tell it’s somewhat contemporary because the photos of Shanghai are somewhat current. But back in 1990-91 when I studied my second year of Mandarin, my book wasn’t even from the previous decade. It was last copyrighted at the end of the Cultural Revolution.

In other words, my book was old even in 1990. There were also some other stark differences between the two. For one, Jake’s uses the pinyin style of romanization that is all-prevalent in China and around the world.

But mine didn’t even use pinyin!

It was the Yale romanization system, which is even less popular than Wade-Giles, which is used in literature that takes place before the 1950s. The difference between Yale and pinyin is pretty big. Take the third column, last character. In the Yale system, dzwo is the romanization for “left”, while in pinyin it’s spelled zuo. And the fifth column, second from the bottom, chywan means whole in Yale romanization, but in pinyin it’s quan. First column, second from the bottom, syau is small in Yale and xiao is small in pinyin.

It was confusing to the say the least. Not only that, but I’d started learning simplified characters with pinyin romanization in Baltimore in 1989 for my first year of Chinese class. The second year, in 1990, I switched to traditional characters with Yale romanization because that’s what my classes in Hong Kong used.

Jake’s book seems interactive with colorful photos and illustrations.

While mine only featured reprints of old short stories, plays and articles. And it read right to left, up to down, in the traditional way people read Chinese.

Jake’s lessons were about more contemporary matters, like famous sites in China and typical conversational topics. I’m not complaining about reading Lao She, Hu Shi, and Lu Xun, the latter two of whom are listed by their Wade-Giles romanized names in this book!

Another thing that’s different about Jake’s book is that it includes both simplified and traditional characters. If my books back then had included both, I might have had an easier time switching between the two. But I survived and was all right returning to the US in 1991 and going back to simplified. I continued with simplified for the next few years until I moved back to Hong Kong and have been using traditional characters ever since. This pocket dictionary was my bible when I was learning Chinese and I still have it today. I was trying to show my kids how to use it (it takes a few steps if one uses the Chinese-English part of the dictionary) and they were not amused. It’s so much easier to use an app these days.

Studying Chinese wasn’t easy all those years ago, but I’m glad I had the chance to learn more than one type of romanization and both simplified (used in China) and traditional characters (used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and in Chinese communities around the world). Personally, I think traditional characters are more beautiful than simplified ones. But when Jake decided he wanted to study abroad in Shanghai, I advised him to learn simplified characters for the two years he would study Chinese before heading off to Shanghai.

好好學習 (study well in traditional characaters)

好好学习 (study well in simplified characters)

Book of the week–Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men

May 13, 2018 By Susan Blumberg-Kason Leave a Comment

Over the last couple of months, I’ve come across Mara Hvistendahl’s 2011 book, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men (Public Affairs), while reading other books about feminism in China. So when I was in New York in March, I braved the bomb cyclone with my kids and picked up a copy of her book at the Strand.

It was so worthwhile.

I read her book last month and couldn’t put it down. It read like a thriller and I found myself shaking my head when I wasn’t clenching my jaw. Hvistendahl was a journalist in China when this book came out and includes data on the gender disparity there. One thing that stood out when I read these more recent books about Chinese feminism was that a small town in Hubei province had a male/female ratio of 3 to 2. These authors quoted Hvistendahl’s book for this statistic and it stood out to me because the small city, Tianmen, was next to the town where my former in-laws live and the area where my oldest son could have ended up had I allowed him to go to China as a young child.

The problem with this disparity is that 100 million men in China are not going to have the opportunity to marry. So women are being trafficked from places like Vietnam, which doesn’t have a gender imbalance. And it’s not just China that’s seeing a gender imbalance. India and Eastern Europe and places like Albania are, too. Hvistendahl explains with data what really happens with such a huge gender imbalance. Rape, murder, gun violence, kidnapping, and trafficking rates increase. It’s not a good deal for women.

What stood out the most in this book was the West’s role in the gender imbalance around the world. “Wholesome” politicians in the US who have espoused family values and the sanctity of life are the very ones who have pushed population control in developing countries. According to Hvistendahl’s research, Republican politicians pushed late-term abortion in Africa and Asia to make sure those populations never grew to become strong. So much for being pro-life. And organizations like Planned Parenthood International didn’t speak out because they feared they would lose reproductive rights back in the US if they questioned this abroad.

Then there were leaders like Indira Gandhi who bought into the US’s plan to limit populations in developing countries and instilled one of the most brutal sterilization programs ever when she was Prime Minister of India. Other world leaders allowed population controls to happen in their countries, too, like China with their one-child policy. They didn’t want the masses to become stronger either.

There was so much that was eye-opening in this book, and Hvistendahl does a fabulous job of covering all the people affected by the gender imbalance in developing countries. And like I wrote above, women and girls do not fair well at all.