Howard Blue's

Asia

Ten years ago Debby and I visited China. It had not been high on my list of countries to visit and for various reasons I did not enjoy the trip as much as I would have liked to. Oh, how I wish I had first read Da Chen's coming of age memoir, Colors of the Mountain, about his experiences during the Cultural Revolution. I am sure it would have created a bridge between me and China.

This page contains some fascinating titles. I'm not totally convinced that Armenia is properly described as an Asian country. But in any case Peter Balakian’s Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir, about his boyhood discovery of his family's memories of the Armenian genocide is a fascinating read, as is Lucy Lum' s The Thorn of Lion City: A Memoir, about her childhood during the World War II Japanese invasion and occupation of Singapore.

To read reviews about a book or order it, click on its title. To quickly reach one of the subtopics immediately below, click on it.

Afghanistan

Akbar, Said Hyder. Come Back to Afghanistan: A California Teenager's Story. Bloomsbury, 2005. An Afghan-American teenager coming of age in post 9/11 Afghanistan.

Doubleday,Veronica. Three Women of Herat: A Memoir of Life, Love and Friendship in Afghanistan. Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2006. An American woman develops strong friendships while living in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion.

Hafvenstein, Joel. Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier. The Lyons Press, 2007. A young American runs a program to help opium poppy farmers make a legal living.

Kaplan, Robert D. Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Vintage, 2001. An American journalist's account of the war in Afghanistan.

Klass, Rosanne. Land of the High Flags: Afghanistan When the Going Was Good. Odyssey, 2007. A classic memoir about the land and its people by the first woman to teach boys from the country's villages, at a time when Afghan women dared not do such things.

Lowe-Ankar, Jennifer and Krakauer, Jon. Forget Me Not: A Memoir. Mountaineer Books, 2009. A widow's tribute to her husband, who was killed in an avalanche while climbing the Himalayas.

Yasgur, Batya Swift. Behind the Burqa: Our Life in Afghanistan and How We Escaped to Freedom. John Wiley & Sons, 2002. By two sisters who left Afghanistan 20 years apart, and the trials they faced.

Armenia

Balakian, Peter. Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir. Basic Books, 2009. A man growing up in the New Jersey suburbs in the 1960's discovers and explores his family's memories of the Armenian genocide.

Melkonian, Markar. My Brother's Road: An American's Fateful Journey to Armenia. I.B. Tauris, 2008. The author attempts to uncover the mystery of the travels of his brother, a man who is denounced as an international terrorist.

Cambodia

Him, Chanrithy. When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge. W.W. Norton & Co., 2001. After surviving US bombings during the Vietnam War, the author experienced and survived the era of the genocidal Khmer Rouge killers.

Mam, Somaly. The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine. Spiegel & Grau, 2009. By a woman sold into sexual slavery by her grandfather when she was twelve years old.

China

Allen, Thomas Gaskell. Across Asia on a Bicycle: The Journey of Two American Students from Constantinople to Peking (1894). Cornell University Library, 2009.

Chen, Da. Colors of the Mountain. Anchor, 2001. The grandson of a landlord describes the persecution of his family during the Cultural Revolution. Howard's Pick

Dewoskin, Rachel. Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China. W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2006. An American actress plays in a Chinese television drama, Foreign Babes in Beijing.

Kadeer, Rebiya. Dragon Fighter: One Woman's Epic Struggle for Peace with China. Kales Press, 2009.

Mah, Adeline Yen. Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter. Broadway, 1999.

McKee, Susan Edwards. Days Like Floating Water, A Story of Modern China. Oak Leaf Impressions Press, 2008. American teachers experience life in rural China.

Nanchu. Red Sorrow. Arcade Publishing, 2001. Author's adolescence in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Pan, Lynn. Tracing It Home: A Chinese Journey. Kodansha America, 1993.

Warmbrunn, Erika. Where the Pavement Ends: One Woman's Bicycle Trip through Mongolia, China and Vietnam. Mountaineer Books, 2001.

Zhang, Zhimei. Foxspirit: A Woman in Mao's China. Vehicule Press, 1993. Life before and after the Cultural Revolution.

Zhengguo, Kang. Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China. W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2008. On coming-of-age during the Cultural Revolution, being imprisoned and then relocated to a work commune.

East Timor

Cardoso, Luis. The Crossing: A Story of East Timor. Granta Books, 2002. Author's childhood in colonial East Timor.

Marker, Jamsheed. East Timor: A Memoir of the Negotiations for Independence. McFarland & Company, 2003. A former UN representative in East Timor on the trials and tragedies that occurred as it struggled for independence.

India

Devidayal, Namita. The Music Room: A Memoir. W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2009. Recalling lessons in classical Indian music at an Anglican primary school in Bombay.

Hajratwala, Minal. Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. An Indian-American journalist tells of her family's diaspora to Australia, South Africa, Hong Kong, the UK and the US.

Jaffrey, Madhur. Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India. Vintage, 2007. A writer about Indian food on her early life in Delhi, during a time and within a society that has since disappeared.

MacDonald, Sarah. Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure. Broadway, 2004. Australian radio correspondent on her two years in India when her TV news correspondent boyfriend, was assigned there.

Shepard, Sadia. The Girl from Foreign: A Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors, Forgotten Histories and a Sense of Home. Penguin Press, 2008. Daughter of a Pakistani Muslim and an American Christian discovers her maternal grandmother was raised as part of the Bene Israel, a decreasing population of Jews in India whose history and current life she begins to document.

Umrigar, Thrity. First Darling of the Morning: Selected Memories of an Indian Childhood. Harper Perennial, 2008. A journalist recalls an upper-middle class childhood, becoming aware of class separation and emigrating to the U.S.

Indonesia

Bresnan, John. At Home Abroad: A Memoir of the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, 1953-1973. Equinox Publishing, 2006. Author recalls his time with the Ford Foundation's overseas work.

Kuegler, Sabine. Child of the Jungle: The True Story of a Girl Caught Between Two Worlds. Grand Central Publishing, 2007. The author was five years old when her German linguist-missionary parents took her to live with a Stone Age tribe in West Papua.

Parnell, Christopher V. V. Hell's Prisoner: Jailed for over Eleven Years in Indonesia's Most Notorious Prisons. Mainstream Publishing. 2005. Author is accused of a crime he didn't commit and kept in inhuman, torturous prisons for eleven years.

Ruff-O'Herne, Jan. Fifty Years of Silence: The Extraordinary Memoir of a War Rape Survivor. Random House, 2008. Former sex slave during the Japanese invasion of Java keep about her experiences to protect her family and herself; finally speaks out when she encounters other rape victims.

Japan

Aponte, Wayne Lionel. The Year of No Money in Tokyo. Watkins & McKay, 2009. An American living in Japan struggles through the country's most intense economic recession since World War II.

Nathan, John. Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere: A Memoir. Free Press, 2008. A Harvard grad begins his professional life by moving to Japan and beginning to explore the media there, and becomes involved in both U.S. and Japanese pop culture industry.

Senoh, Kappa and John Bester. A Boy Called H: A Childhood in Wartime Japan. Kodansha International, 2003. Author on his boyhood in wartime Japan, when he was little more than an automaton; while he secretly opposed the war, his actions spoke otherwise.

Steinman, Louise. The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father's War. North Atlantic Books, 2008. After discovering a box of her father's letters from his time fighting the Japanese during World War II, author visits the places where her father fought, and in Japan returns a small flag he had found, to the family of the Japanese soldier to whom it had belonged.

Laos

Brown, Mervyn. War in Shangri-La: A Memoir of Civil War in Laos. Radcliffe Press, 2001. The author recalls the tension of his time as a British diplomat in Laos when U.S. fear of communism was on the rise.

Myanmar

Mawdsley, James. The Iron Road: A Stand for Truth and Democracy in Burma. North Point Press, 2002. Author's experiences as a political prisoner in Myanmar.

Thwe, Pascal Khoo. From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey. Harper Perennial, 2003. A man from the sole Catholic village in all of Burma describes his life and the effects of the modern, Americanized pop culture world as it seeped into his world.

Nepal

Paskal, Anna. The Water Gods: The Inside Story of a World Bank Project in Nepal. Vehicule, 2000. 22 year old author travels to the Arun Valley, proposed site of $2 billion dam.

North Korea

Jenkins, Charles Robert and Jim Frederick. The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea. Univ. of California Press, 2009. Fearing transfer to Vietnam, a US soldier stationed in South Korea goes into North Korea, from which he only escapes 40 years later.

Kang, Chol-hwan. The Aquariums of Pyongyang:Ten years in the North Korean Gulag. Basic Books, 2005.

Lee, Soon Ok. Eyes of the Tailless Animals: Prison Memoirs of a North Korean Woman. Living Sacrifice Book Co., 1999.

Pakistan

Mortenson, Greg. Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations . . . One School at a Time. Penguin Books, 2007. On the author's work in building schools in remote Pakistani villages.

Musharraf, Pervez. In the Line of Fire: A Memoir. Free Press, 2008. Recent Pakistani President on his efforts to capture al Qaeda members, a failed assassination attempt against him, and his election in 1999.

Philippines

Dowlen, Dorothy Dore and Kaminski, Theresa. Enduring What Cannot Be Endured: Memoir of a Woman Medical Aide in the Philippines in World War II. McFarland, 2001. Author recalls horrific treatment of her people at the hands of Japanese invaders after Pearl Harbor.

Singapore

Lum, Lucy. The Thorn of Lion City: A Memoir. PublicAffairs, 2007. On the author's dysfunctional Chinese family living in Singapore during the World War II Japanese occupation of the island nation. Howard's Pick

South Korea

Thomas, Cullen. Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons. Penguin Books, 2008. A recent graduate who had gone to South Korea to teach English is caught bringing drugs into the country is imprisoned for over 3 years.

Howard Blue's

Asia

Google Analytics