After reading Ahdaf Soueif's The map of love, I hunted for more "map books". Here are my first discoveries:

1.
Kim Fay, 2012, The map of lost memories

This was a curious book.

What's good?

Well, it's a quest... An American curator sets out to find the copper scrolls that will tell us what happened to the kings of Angkor. There are maps in it, even better, and little clues that are supposed to lead the protagonists (and us) through the garden of secrets to the treasure at the end. Who wouldn't like that?

The 1920s oriental settings are lusciously described (and apparently painstakingly researched). Shanghai, Saigon, Phnom Penh. All glowing with atmosphere.



And its basic premise -- that Westerners of the era would trample their dying grannies (not to mention entire local societies) to get at oriental art, but that some were, paradoxically, still able to see through the iniquity of colonialism -- is not entirely lacking in authenticity.

But...

As Marie Arana puts it, it is hard to like Fay's characters; serious explanations of their choices are lacking until the very last minute; and annoyingly, "a hand comes, ex machina, to solve every twist and turn". It is all terribly NEAT.

And it reads "modern" to me. It doesn't read like the period piece it is meant to be.

Whether it's entirely fair to describe it as "a prime example of exoticized literary colonization", I'm not sure. But there is something uncomfortable about it. I felt it was playing fast and loose with borrowed characters and appropriated histories, and in the process creating something not quite authentic.









2.
Ha Jin, 2014, A map of betrayal

This story, apparently based on the career of real-life Chinese spy Larry Wu-Tai Chin, recounts the fictional double life of Gary Shang, who almost accidentally drifts into spying for China while translating for the CIA. After his death, his double life is explored by his American daughter, who discovers a parallel Chinese family, unwillingly abandoned by Shang as his career inexorably widens the gulf between his two personae.

This is a low-key story. While it shares the "embedded spy" theme of The Americans, the development of that theme could not be more different.

But the key dilemma is clearly and engagingly evoked: being caught between two loyalties is a deadly business.

This is a dilemma that the author personally identifies with (albeit on a less dangerous level): "In 2009 he told the Paris Review, 'I live in the margin as a writer -- between two languages, two cultures, two literatures, two countries. This is treacherous territory.'"

I guess anyone who has lived for any length of time in different countries can relate to that predicament at least to some degree.

Shang's agony is that he loves both his countries -- even when they both go pretty disastrously astray. His tragedy is that he "wants to change both countries he loves but is finally left alone, stranded between two loves he can never reconcile".

While it's a thought-provoking read, Shang himself remains something of a cipher throughout. Although I could empathize with his position, I never really felt I knew him. His daughter, the narrator of half the chapters, is also annoyingly preachy, and if I were part of her new-found Chinese family, I would give her a good talking to about the concept of interference.

And the map? Well, I guess it's the tracing of the bidirectional strands of betrayal -- personal and political -- that radiate out from that central figure. He betrays his two families; he betrays his two countries. His two countries betray him (China through outright deception, the US by that fateful American dream). The curious thing is that none of it was really willed. A door opened, he went through it, and there was no looking back...



3.
Benjamin Alire Saenz, 2008, Names on a map

This book portrays a Mexican-American family. The grandparents' generation fled to the US to escape political violence in Mexico (presumably the 1920s civil war). But they didn't flee far. They live right on the border, in El Paso, Texas.

The story's central dilemma is the drafting of the oldest son (of the third generation) into the war in Viet Nam. His choices are Viet Nam, gaol, Canada, or Mexico. He chooses Mexico. The agonizing predicament is depicted very movingly, and contextualized on the one hand by characters who represent different stances on this core problem, and on the other by the passing of the grandmother, the last of the exiled generation.

It's very much a story about divides. Are you someone who stays true to his/her native culture, or have you adapted and compromised? The whole second generation "wanted their sons to stay Mexican. Yet they wanted them to love America, absorb its history, its customs, fight in its wars, fit, belong, speak English perfectly. And when you fit in and were as American as you could possibly be, they turned around and hated you for it."

Are you someone who will fight, or someone who will not fight?

Are you someone who "belongs" to the US, or someone who will never truly belong? What does belonging mean, anyway? "One man's belonging is another man's exile" -- a sentiment that Gustavo ends up enacting very literally. It is because he "belongs" to America that he is forced to voluntarily exile himself.

The map in this book represents the younger brother's obsession with mapping where people are. "Putting everybody's name on a map made him happy. If their names were there, they were safe." Gustavo's departure, of course, makes him hard to map, as his twin sister and younger brother realize all too well when they accompany him to the border:

"They stood there, inches from the Santa Fe bridge. The world had ended. There was only the three of them. Three small names on the map of the world."

A Viet Nam returnee muses:

"You know, the head, it's like a map. Not a map that gives you directions, but a map with names on it -- names of guys who were killed in the way, names of the people you left behind, names of countries and villages and cities. Names. After all these years, that's all that's left. Names. But no directions. And no way to reach them, no way to get back what you lost."

One review notes: "Saenz deftly captures a mood, but his obsession with introspection bloats the family story." And I think that's definitely true.

Nevertheless, the final separation is profoundly moving.

All three books, it turned out, were about cultural encounters. And in their treatment of the personal, political, and civilizational issues involved in such encounters, all had something valid to say.