A reason I liked The Sympathizer, or diversity is unity is diversity

A big reason I liked The Sympathizer:

Author Viet Thanh Nguyen's occasional jokes about the cultural differences between the north and the south of Vietnam, including this:

"Besides the simple yet elegant cha-cha, the twist was the favorite dance of the southern people, requiring as it did no coordination."

That makes me want to know about who is what in Vietnam. There's more to the North-South dynamic than communist vs. its opposite, us vs. them, colonial vs. indigenous, or all the rest of the usual dichotomies. Portrayals of tensions and rivalries within cultures unfamiliar to me always make those cultures seem more real and more human. It's why I like Henry Chang's Chinatown novels and Joe Nazel's Street Wars, and also why I like Isaac Babel's Odessa tales and Dashiell Hammett's story "Dead Yellow Women," which, despite a title unlikely to be allowed today, says more on its first page about Chinese social and political diversity in China and in the United States than I suspect many readers are accustomed to thinking about.

 I can well imagine that a minority group might be skittish about presenting divisions to the wider world, but to me that makes those populations seem that much more human. Reminders that no group is monolithic seem especially important in a time when religious and cultural differences are so easily exploited.

Years ago, I staggered into a restaurant in London late one morning, near-exhausted by jet lag. I was the only customer at that hour, Arabic-sounding music was playing, and the waitress was a curvy, henna-haired beauty, so I chatted her up.  The encounter happened several years after after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and as the month of Ramadan drew to a close. Both facts are relevant to what followed:

Me: "What is that music?"|
Waitress: "It's Arabic music."
Me: "I know it's Arabic music. From where?"
Waitress: "It's from my country."
Me: "Where is your country?"
Waitress: "I came from Paris, actually."
Me: "Where were you before you were there?"
Waitress: "Beirut."
Me: "Christian or Muslim?" 
Waitress: (Nervously) "Muslim."
Me: "I ask because it must be hard to serve food all day while you're fasting."
Waitress: (Relaxes and bursts into hearty laughter) "I don't fast during the day, but I sure do party at night."

That might offend some Muslims and make some white liberals squirm, and I'd have hesitated to name the woman or her restaurant in a newspaper story. But I cannot imagine a better lesson in common humanity. And no, she did not party with me that night.

(Read my posts on The Sympathizer and Portnoy's Complaint: One man's squid is another man's liver and The Sympathizer, Part II: Genre, politics, and genre politics.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

My Bouchercon 2015 panels: Dashiell Hammett and Chinese-American history

Back in 2008, I wrote that Henry Chang's novel Year of the Dog

"not only introduces us to Chinatown's newer Fukienese arrivals, with their wide ideological separation from the neighborhood's longer-established residents, but [Chang] portrays dangerous criminal rivalries among these relative newcomers."

Then, as now, Chang's work led me to reflect on an aspect of Dashiell Hammett I had not thought of previously. That's timely because I'll be talking about Hammett with Julie M. Rivett and Richard Layman next month at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, North Carolina. The session is called "Inside the Mind and Work of Dashiell Hammett," and it happens Saturday, October 10, at 8:30 a.m. There's still time to register, so I'll see you there, and I may even buy you a cup of coffee after the panel.

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I've cited Henry Chang's crime novels for their portrayals of a New York Chinatown more complex than non-residents might think. Longtime residents are suspicious of newcomers; alliances, ethnic rivalries and cultural habits spill over from the old country; and Hong Kong Chinese restaurants are flashier than all others.

Dashiell Hammett did something similar in 1925, in a story called "Dead Yellow Women." That's not a title one would see today unless it was intended with irony, and it may make readers in 2015 cringe. But take a look at what Hammett does at the beginning of the story:

"The San Francisco papers had been full of her affairs for a couple of days. They had printed photographs and diagrams, interviews, editorials, and more or less expert opinions from various sources. They had gone back to 1912 to remember the stubborn fight of the local Chinese—mostly from Fokien and Kwangtung, where democratic ideas and hatred of Manchus go together—to have her father kept out of the United States, to which he had scooted when the Manchu rule flopped. The papers had recalled the excitement in Chinatown when Shan Fang was allowed to land—insulting placards had been hung in the streets, an unpleasant reception had been planned.

"But Shan Fang had fooled the Cantonese. Chinatown had never seen him. He had taken his daughter and his gold—presumably the accumulated profits of a life-time of provincial misrule—down to San Mateo County, where he had built what the papers described as a palace on the edge of the Pacific."

I don't know about you, but that makes me curious about who made up the population of America's Chinatowns and how those populations changed after the Qing dynasty, China's last, fell in 1912. And that's a lot of history to pack into a humble pulp story.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010, 2015

Noir at the Bar New York in words and pictures

Noir at the Bar has covered the globe like a fast-growing but benign fungus since I staged the first ones in Philadelphia back in 2008. Sunday night I had good fun at Noir at the Bar New York.

Suzanne Solomon

Joe Samuel Starnes

The venue was Shade in the West Village, the MC was Thomas Pluck, the food, the beer, and the company were good, and the readings were damn good. As a bonus, Henry Chang, that most amiable author of hard-hitting crime novels set in Chinatown, showed up even though he wasn't on the bill;  those New York crime writers have a cozy little community on their cozy little island.  Here's part of what happened (all photos by your humble blogkeeper):

Alex Segura, Todd Robinson

(One of these pictures does not depict a crime writer. Rather, it's a face I saw earlier in the day, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,  but I thought it fit the evening's noir theme. It looks like a small-time hood who is beginning to worry his plan to rip off the boss and flee with the boss' woman may not go as well as he planned.)

Gerald So and his reflection. I call
this photo So and So.

Thomas Pluck, Jeff Soloway

Clare Gilliland Toohey. I wonder if she
likes this collection of stories by Gil Brewer.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Bouchercon, Day 5: A preliminary wrap-up

Eddie Muller was the #Bcon2010 toastmaster. He's also a native San Franciscan and was a member of Friday's "San Francisco noir" panel. He had this to say about the city as a breeding ground for noir after someone said people come there to reinvent themselves:

"We breed people who exploit those people when they come to San Francisco. ... There are people who are waiting here to exploit those who come here to find themselves."

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Three authors who impressed me with their intelligence, humor, critical acuity, willingness to stake out provocative positions, or some combination of these: John Connolly, Denise Mina, Val McDermid.

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Three of my panelists whom I enjoyed listening to as they talked about their native country of South Africa at the bar: Jassy Mackenzie, Michael Sears, Stanley Trollip.

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Two panelists with whom I ate dim sum in Chinatown on Sunday: Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Christopher G. Moore. (Their spouses were there, too, and I'm happy to have them as panelists-in-law.)

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Panelists who were exceedingly pleasant to work and spend time with: the lot of them. Really.

One hears whispered tales of difficult panelists, but none was mine. The aforementioned plus James R. Benn, Cara Black, Lisa Brackmann, Henry Chang and Stuart Neville were good company, and concise, entertaining and informative in their answers. I enjoyed our discussions on stage and off. Thanks, guys.

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© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Atmosphere (Henry Chang)

(Henry Chang will be a member of my "Flags of Terror" panel at Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco. This post originally appeared in November 2008.)

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Year of the Dog, Henry Chang's second novel for Soho Crime, is all atmosphere – meteorological, economic, social and human – with plot strands gradually weaving their way into the story until one realizes that many of the details that constitute the atmosphere turn out to be plot elements.

To find out what I mean, you'll have to read the book. For now, know that the novel's opening is worthy of any number of 1950s films noirs. So is the rest of the book, for that matter. The New York of The Naked City contained eight million stories; Year of the Dog makes a valiant run at that number, giving us protagonist Jack Yu, who can't keep away from his old Chinatown precinct; a dying bookie who comments wryly on his own romantic dreams; the hairdresser, cruelly exploited by human traffickers, who tries to help him.

We come to know a boyhood friend of Jack's who dies in gang violence and a mysteriously named Triad official sent from Hong Kong to check on criminal operations in New York, and that's just a start. Chang not only introduces us to Chinatown's newer Fukienese arrivals, with their wide ideological separation from the neighborhood's longer-established residents, but he portrays dangerous criminal rivalries among these relative newcomers. And, of course, the Chinese characters interact, sometimes uneasily or violently, with black, Hispanic and white characters. This is, after all New York.

So effectively has the atmosphere been set that when the climactic confrontation happens, inevitable in general plan, an accident in its details, it seems at once cathartic and fated.

As dark crime novels often do, Year of the Dog has a touch of grim humor. Here, that touch is more wryly comic than most. Sai Go, the dying bookie, thinks of how he might like to spend his final months:

"He had a vision of himself in Thailand somewhere, a sunny tropical vista with brown-skinned girls to ease his remaining days. Spend the nights drinking Singha beer and feasting on satays, chow kueh teow noodles, and tom yum soup.

"When he thought better of it, he felt he could just as easily go to Fat Lily's or Angelina's for brown-skinned girls, and to Penang or Jaya Village for Thai beer, roti and hainam chicken. For the sunny vista he could take a bus south on the interstate, or take the train with the skylight roof to Florida somewhere for a few weeks. Somewhere sunny and not too far. A cruise to one of the islands What would he do with a shipload of lo fang strangers? He could just as well be alone in Manhattan, if he only turned off his cell phones and stayed out of the OTB and Chinatown."

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(The "Flags of Terror" panel happens Friday, Oct. 15, at 10 a.m. Click here for the complete Bouchercon lineup.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Any more panels, and I'll be able to furnish a rec room

I'm moderating two panels at Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco, Oct. 14-17. "The Stamp of Death" happens Thursday, Oct. 14, at 3 p.m. (The panel's title is a tribute to the host city's crime-drama tradition.)

Panelists are Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, who write together as Michael Stanley; Yrsa Sigurðardóttir; and Christopher G. Moore, with yours truly lending an unobtrusive guiding hand.

"Flags of Terror" (whose title has a similar origin) on Friday, Oct. 15, at 10 a.m., brings together James R. Benn, Cara Black, Lisa Brackmann, Henry Chang, Jassy Mackenzie and Stuart Neville for an hour or so of civilized discussion, with your humble blogkeeper again asking the questions and frisking the participants for weapons.

The authors on these panels take readers to Iceland, Botswana, China, South Africa, Thailand, Northern Ireland, England, France, and what may be the setting richest with possibility, New York's Chinatown. And you're invited along for the ride, whether at the convention or by reading, reading and reading.

I'll see you at Bouchercon. And remember: If you're baking in San Francisco, be sure to wear some flour in your hair.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Red Jade, or what diversity really means

The border the protagonist crosses in Henry Chang's Red Jade is domestic and invisible but nonetheless real:

"As soon as Jack Yu caught the address, he knew. Chinatown again. He was going back to the place he'd left behind when he moved to Brooklyn's Sunset Park, just across the river but a world away."

Professional courtesy prevents me from quoting further (My copy is an uncorrected proof), but that bit is nicely stark and economical, and the book looks set to be as rich with atmosphere and incident as Chang's previous novel, Year of the Dog.

Early in Red Jade, Yu, a New York police detective who has transferred out of Chinatown's Fifth Precinct only to find himself thrown right back to investigate an apparent murder-suicide, reflects bitterly on sensitivity, diversity and the pernicious misuses to which "people in command" put these once admirable concepts. As it happens, Chang's books are salutary lessons in what diversity was before the corporate sensitivity peddlers took the word over for that brief, embarrassing period in the 1990s.

The inhabitants of Yu's Chinatown have quite enough on their minds without worrying all the time about the city's other ethnic groups. Sure, there are racially tinged confrontations with whites and blacks; this is New York, after all.

But tension exists as well between longtime Chinatown residents and Fukienese newcomers. And in one marvelous observation, Yu attributes the new, slick decor of Chinese restaurants, so unlike the rambling old places of his youth, to Hong Kong influence.

Now, that's real diversity.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Strictly business in New York

This evening's Soho Crime event at Partners & Crime in New York was more meet and mingle than rap and read, and time passed too quickly for me to do all the meeting and mingling with the authors that I'd have liked to do. Still, editors, publicists, booksellers and a collector and fan with apparently wide Irish crime-fiction contacts made for an enjoyable and possibly productive evening.

Eliot Pattison, one of the six featured meeters and minglers, writes series about Tibet and colonial America, but he's a big fan of Irish and other Celtic music, it transpires. We didn't get the chance to chat about his Tibet books, of which I've read two and bought a third at the event. But he did tell me about some good places to hear Celtic music. (The other authors were Cara Black, Garry Disher, Mick Herron, Henry Chang and James R. Benn. I'd particularly have liked more time to talk technique with Disher.) I also saw a copy of Adrian McKinty's Fifty Grand on display, and a Soho editor told me about a new title they're really excited about: Stuart Neville's Ghosts of Belfast. There's something to this Irish crime fiction thing.

Alas, my train ride home called to mind another Irish crime novel. Three passengers on the Amtrak Quiet Car, where cell-phone use is barred, were using their cell phones. The serial killer in Ken Bruen's Calibre would have known what to do about that.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Cross-border crime-fiction events in Philadelphia and New York

Cara Black and Garry Disher headline the next Robin’s Book Store’s Crime Fiction Book Club brunch this Sunday, May 24, 1 p.m. at Bridget Foy’s, 200 South Street, Philadelphia, 215-922-1813.

On Wednesday, May 27, at 7 p.m., Black and Disher will join Mick Herron , Elliot Pattison, Henry Chang and James R. Benn for a Soho Crime chat and signing at Partners & Crime, 44 Greenwich Avenue, in New York. Call 212-243-0440.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Detectives across the Canada-U.S. border

Something interesting is going on in Canadian crime fiction. John McFetridge's Swap, to be published in the U.S. late this year or early next, opens with a Canada-U.S. border crossing. Howard Shrier, like McFetridge a Montreal native now living in Toronto, is setting up a kind of cross-border travelogue in his new series about Toronto investigator Jonah Geller (The first book is Buffalo Jump, the second High Chicago).

I'm from Montreal, too, and I am familiar with Canadians' understandable apprehension about being swallowed up culturally by the United States. I grew up, for instance, among rules mandating a certain proportion of Canadian content on radio and television. So it's nice to come across work that neither cringes at the U.S. nor ignores it.

And it's nice to read crime fiction that acknowledges this globalized world of ours. Savvy crime writers are recognizing that global and local perspectives need not be mutually exclusive, that they can interact in all sorts of interesting ways. Henry Chang's Year of the Dog comes to mind. The author is American, from New York's Chinatown, and his fiction examines its crowded streets in minute detail. Yet the criminal life he depicts is intertwined with that of mainland China, of Hong Kong and, yes, of Canada.

(Read the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with John McFetridge here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon II: Win three signed stories!

The late, lamented Murdaland magazine published tough, beautifully written crime fiction in a sturdy, attractive, well-produced package.

The magazine's no longer around, but you can win a copy of Issue 2 signed by contributors of three of the best stories in this outstanding collection: Scott Phillips, Vicki Hendricks and Henry Chang . All you have to do is name any of the last three winners of either the Edgar or the Dagger award for best short story.

WE HAVE A WINNER! Kerrie in Paradise (that's part of Australia) knew that Martin Edwards won the CWA Short Story Dagger in 2008 for "The Bookbinder's Apprentice" and that Peter Lovesey had won the previous year for "Apprentice." Congratulations, Kerrie, and enjoy this excellent magazine/book.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008