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by Eleanor Bluestein. Yup, I got a review copy and I really enjoyed it. It’s a collection of short stories about the people of Ayama Na, an imaginary country that’s maybe Cambodia, maybe somewhere else, maybe cobbled together out of bits of Southeast Asia. Though I had the opportunity to ask the author about this imaginary place, I passed on that intentionally, I didn’t want reality to color my vision of what Ayama Na looks like, though I did patch it together in my own head, using pieces of Vietnam and Cambodia.<\/p>\nThe characters in the stories are all wrapped in the culture clash of Southeast Asia’s modernity — the would be monk who works construction, a fast food restaurant worker protecting her family’s honor, the artist railing against caring for her dying father, the aspiring actor who knows The Godfather by heart… they’re all walking the razor sharp line between their historic culture and the roles assigned to them by that society, and the pull of modern life. Even the American artist, bugged out, gone crazy, and maybe even worse, gone local<\/em>, in the underground society of beggars and whores, embodies the collision, head on, of two models of living that seem incompatible and yet, coexist.<\/p>\n I couldn’t read this book from a distance. I kept thinking about the kid in the cafe in Hanoi. I complimented his English and when he thanked me, he told me he’d studied it for a few years now in university. “What are you studying?” I asked. “IT,” he responded, “you know, computer science.”<\/p>\n Why not? Just because I was in the middle of a city that looked nothing like anywhere I’d been, where the noise and the sights and the smell were so overwhelming that I could not take it for more than a few hours at a time, why couldn’t this kid be a future computer nerd? There’s no good reason at all. The only reason I was flustered was that he did not fit my narrow imagined view of what his life could be like.<\/p>\n Eleanor Bluestein’s characters remind me of that kid. They carry all the weight of their imaginary history, but also, they face forward, into whatever modern life is going to bring them, be it french fries or computerized toys or a husband hand picked by the family. The book is a great read, I enjoyed it tremendously.<\/p>\n