Some Books

Yunte Huang, a Chinese-American immigrant and professor of English, has now written a trilogy of books that mix cultural biography with Chinese-American history.  The first is about Charlie Chan (who might have been partially inspired by a real-life police detective, if not quite like him), the famous Siamese Twins, and the Chinese actress Anna May Wong.

I read the first and third books. Both are interesting though he at times lays on too thick the historical details.  The Charlie Chan book is the best in part since there are in effect three stories (the real-life detective, the writer, and the films), it is more of a straight history.  The Anna May Wong book has too much historical color, one might say.  I also didn't get a full sense of Wong's personality, especially any romantic relationships she had.

Another book, shorter, is The Opium Queen by Gabrielle Paluch, a journalist.  Olive Yang is a genderqueer, a lesbian who favors male pronouns, involved in the illegal drug trade in Burma.  Her family for a long time controlled a border area though lost control eventually after Burma became independent after World War II.  

The book is somewhat garbled, including going back and forth between modern-day interviews and past events.  We get a basic history of Olive Wang from the 1927 to 1962.  She is arrested (not for the first time) and then there are around ten pages left, the rest of her life barely referenced.  Wikipedia tells me she was released in 1968, though I wouldn't really know this from the book.  She was in prison for six years?

(Various things also are sort of left handing including a foreign-born wife of a sibling, who she herself had fallen in love with at the time. We briefly hear about the wife and then she disappears. What happened to her?)  

What happened after that is again rather unclear though we get a few details.  The book is of some interest but really needed a bit better editing.  Also, there is some argument she is a sort of antihero, but to me, she doesn't seem very appealing.  Olive Yang comes off as a smuggler, who benefited from the no-man's-land of the border of Burma and Communist China.

Her fluid sexuality is interesting but the book doesn't really give her enough detail to get much of a sense of that either.  The material is promising but I was disappointed about the final result.  Maybe, expand it a bit in the next edition?