nwasianweekly.com
February 21, 2004
Join the Northwest Asian Weekly for its second annual Rainbow Bookfest:
Celebrating Authors of Color at Union Station, Fifth Avenue and Jackson
Street in Seattle, on April 24, 2004. This year’s event will feature
a poetry slam, workshops for kids and many new workshops featuring authors
of color. Visit www.rainbowbookfest.com.
A quick look at books
Set in a provincial college on the Yellow River in China, The Crazed is a novel about redemption — both searching for it and finding it in ourselves, in one another and in life itself.
Jian Wan is a star pupil whose teacher, Professor Yang, becomes ill. Partly because of Jian’s engagement to the professor’s daughter and, we come to discover, many other forces, the student is asked to take care of his teacher. Yang’s stroke comes just as the events surrounding Tiananmen Square are coalescing. Politics, petty intrigues and unexplained fears abound. What unfolds as Jian cares for his teacher leads the young student straight into the heart of change — for the world and for Jian Wan.
Although considered outstanding by his colleagues, Yang, an aged classical literature professor, has fallen short of his own dreams. As he faces mortality, this lacking torments. As he writhes on his bed day after day, he recites, lectures, reminisces and scolds, sometimes to no one at all. A mystery unfolds, though, and along the way there is a treatise on all kinds of topics, from comparisons of Chinese and Western literature to explorations of Dante and Goethe. With a steady, almost numbing, grasp of storytelling elements, the author winds his reader to a fever pitch, confronting both the political and the individual dilemmas faced by his characters.
The Crazed is the second novel from Ha Jin, a Chinese immigrant who has said that learning to speak English made his jaws hurt. A student of Russian writers like Chekov and Gogol, Ha Jin came to the United States in 1985 to study at Brandeis University and has achieved many important American literary awards, including the PEN/Hemingway prize for his poetry, the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, a National Book Award and a PEN/Faulkner award for his first novel, Waiting.
Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames, by Thich Nhat Hanh. Published by Riverhead Books, 2001.
The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh is known internationally as teacher, scholar and poet. Anger joins his more than 100 publications (40 in English) on the subject of nonviolence, enlightenment, peace and love.
Combining the skills of a poet and scholar, Nhat Hanh is able to offer many complicated ideas about self-discipline and mastering our worst (and best) qualities without relying on religious language. For example, he talks about “cooking your anger,” which means getting to know your anger and spending time with it rather than denying that you have it.
An exile from Vietnam for his anti-war activities, he often draws upon Vietnamese culture in his teaching. For example, in discussing communication, he describes how husbands and wives in Vietnam are expected to treat one another as respectfully as they would a guest.
Communication is the key to healing in the world, and Anger offers many lessons on how to speak and listen more wisely. The famous monk does not restrict the idea of acting like a “Great Being” to powerful teachers. He emphasizes the importance of nurturing ourselves at the same time that we are working very hard to help others.
Anger is the kind of book to which readers can return again and again. There are so many exercises and meditations that the reader will probably wear it out before they master every aspect of it. There is something for everyone, whether you want to practice being a little peaceful or a lot. Or in the words of Nhat Hanh, “If you don’t help, who will?”
Ann-Marie Stillion can be reached at annmarie@nwasianweekly.com.
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