It's been a few days since I finished reading Home Bound and I'm still mulling it over in my head, turning the things Vanessa -- can I call her that? Is it too familiar? -- has told me. On the one hand, it feels like she and I have much in common: the Spice Girls and Hey, Arnold! are part of the memorabilia of my own 90s teenage years. Vanessa's memoir strikes a familiar note in many ways. Home Bound is a memoir of movement and migration, transcultural and transnational switching and code switching, and the conflict of culture between places and communities and within a place and a single community. I know that. I've experienced that before and now, still.

Home Bound traces Vanessa's life from her childhood through to the present, across time as well as space. Her life begins in Cameroon, a place she is ever drawn back to (is she as uprooted as the title suggests), but she grows up in France, in a number of places, in a number of homes and neighborhoods. Vanessa disabuses us of any romantic notions of France and how the French live. But then, she makes the point in her memoir that she is only partially French. Her memoir takes us to London where she was more French than English, a mix of Cameroonian and French depending on the location. Then to America, where she becomes domiciled in one of the most American of American states, Texas.

But, of course, Home Bound is more than just a travel log.

The book takes us into deep discussions about gender and what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a sexual being, a sexualized being or object, and how to object to that objectification. It explores mothering and growing up, coming-of-age and what that means when it is done across multiple cultures. The book is also about faith, the religious kind and the internal, subjective kind ("believing in yourself"). Vanessa boldly brings up being of mixed race heritage, discusses adoption and parentage. Lineage is a major thread that winds through the book, guides the reader. Ideas are intergenerational, travel through blood as well as through proximity, from a caregiver to their charge. Education is not merely academic, formal, institutionalized. Home Bound makes it clear that it is more complex than that, it is pervasive within and out of the classroom.

The classroom is a large part of Vanessa's memoir. I should say, education is a large part of her memoir. The classroom is the locale of her education, the formal kind and the ideological kind. It is here, in the discussion of education and upbringing that Vanessa's story departs from my own and I feel like I am watching a film of someone else. Someone who feels familiar but is not me.

There is familiarity in the the demise of her American dream. Its death is similar in some ways to what happened to my own. She says in one part how she had thought of herself in some ways as white, having been raised and lived among white people for so long. It's not an uncommon experience. Fanon was onto something universal when he warned us of masks and disguises that fool no one but ourselves. Vanessa and I both woke up. Then our American dream died, unable to sustain in the reality of 21st century capitalism and American privatization, without a trust fund to help keep it breathing. The classroom had a lot to do with the deaths of our dreams.

I realize now, as I write this, why I call her Vanessa. It seems like Bee isn't her name. Shouldn't it is be Billé? And why "A." and not "Assae"? I suspect this has something to do with the subtitle, Uprooted. For me, the subtitle, An Uprooted Daughter's Reflections on Belonging, strikes me differently, perhaps because of my academic background in history. The subtitle calls to mind Oscar Handlin's The Uprooted, that magnum opus of migration history that centered the migrant, their "peasant" origins, and their struggles to find their feet -- plant new roots -- in American soil. Did Vanessa mean to infer a kind of transition from peasantry into... educated bourgeoisie? I don't know. I don't think so. I can't see it. But uprooted means something. Perhaps it is the violence of being separated from one's comfortable ideas, coming to terms with the deflation of an illusion; in Vanessa's case, of her fathers, her faith, her marriage, her trust in men, her color and all that "color" means as it is used to define us in others' eyes and as we use it to define ourselves.

This is a complex memoir, as complicated as Vanessa's personal history. It sprawls, but its many parts and tangents cohere to a single theme: Home Bound is about figuring out who your people are and realizing that we will not find a perfect fit in any community. We will belong in some ways, be alienated in others. Some times it is a matter of chronology; we belonged in the past, we cannot belong in the present. Sometimes we belong with strangers, sometimes those closest to us are not those who should have our trust. If I sound bleak, I do not mean to; Home Bound makes it clear that the journey -- perhaps for all of us -- is complicated -- and sometimes it really helps to see how someone else navigated it.

Home Bound is a profound, nuanced memoir well-worth the reading. 

This novel is about loss, many different kinds of loss through death or ill luck, through forces of politics and history beyond our own or anyone's individual control. It is about loss as a natural outcome of growth and change. It is about loss and its inscrutable, unshakeable companion, grief. It is also about the successors to loss: acceptance, perspective, renewal.

The story begins with a mystery and an immediate confrontation with loss. Yitian, a middle aged Chinese professor of mathematics who lives and works in the United States, finds himself on the calm end of a frantic phone call with his mother who announces that his father has gone missing. The remainder of the novel revolves around this event. This is the first loss, an obvious one.

But as the story unfolds and Yitian returns to China to solve this mystery, help his mother, and locate his father, it becomes clear this is only the last of many that have come before. The novel moves fluidly from the present into the deep past, into Yitian's childhood, teenage years, and early adulthood.

We encounter the loss of worlds that no longer exist: China pre-1949, before Mao and the Cultural Revolution stripped Chinese culture down to a party line; China in the throes of the Cultural Revolution when young men and women were "sent down" youths, cast out of towns and cities and abandoned in the countryside, their personal desires and ambitions beaten out of them; China of the 1980s in its easing up of strict communist restrictions on lifestyle and living.

As Tang Yitian re-engages with China and the people of his past, the reader experiences with him the loss of his past. In that past is death of different kinds. There is literal death, but also metaphorical death -- of love, romance, family cohesion. We encounter loss and grief as disappointment. So often disappointment is overlooked as a form of loss, but Tang's A Map for the Missing makes a profound case for it here. The repeated disappointments that life deals us are obstacles in our path, they are barriers that prevent us from manifesting into reality the image of ourselves we see in our heads. Yitian's wife experiences this. So does Hanwen. So too do the elder Tang men.

We also see the tale unravel from the point of view of those in Yitian's past, specifically Hanwen, a young woman, one of the "sent down" youths. In some ways, A Map for the Missing is a tale of these two characters and how their encounter, brief and powerful, shaped their lives.

This is a novel of how loss shapes our lives. And because of that, the novel is less bleak than it might seem at the outset. There is a hopefulness embedded in it. Perhaps this is hinted at in the promise of its title. A map leads to a destination, doesn't it? It rescues the lost. It is simply a matter of reading the map, learning the topography and the legend and its scale. Yitian's journey lasts only a few weeks in real time, but it is really a deep delve into his past of several decades; it is on this journey into the past that he learns how to read the map.

A Map for the Missing takes us with Yitian and the other characters on their trips through memory. Belinda Huijuan Tang's prose is a delicate vehicle for the reader's ride. The reader will barely feel the movement as they are shuttled through the novel from one moment to another, from one story to another, the past, the present, back again. Her prose flows. The chapters flow. Tang's description of place, perhaps foreign to some readers, fits the mood of the novel; it is sparse in parts, but succinct, delivering an image for the reader's mind in a sweep of few words. The characters too are real, even if their histories and cultures might differ from the average English-reading audience; they are easily recognizable across cultures. The men and women of Tang's novel are grounded in a specifically Chinese history and culture, but they are also relatable as mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, teenagers, young adults, wives, and husbands.

The reader will travel with these characters, witnessing Chinese history and their lives silently. At the end of this book, the reader cannot help but feel like they've gone somewhere familiar and alien. All of us know this story, we know this journey; it may be one we've taken before or one that we know we should take ourselves -- or one we might be forced to undertake, like some of the characters here. You, Reader, will feel exhausted, but you'll also feel... hopeful.

A Map for the Missing is a wandering worth the taking. for both the destination and the experiences along the way. 

Phong Nguyen beats out a strong, feminist song in Bronze Drum, one that makes my Southeast Asian woman's heart swell and weep and soar all at the same time. It is a rare moment when a book makes me feel seen. As a historian of Southeast Asian history, I am deeply grateful for this rare and unique novel that so brilliantly and beautifully captures an often overlooked era and people.

Southeast Asia's ancient history is little known outside of academic circles. Even within that small enclave, many scholars of the region focus on contemporary Southeast Asia or modern Southeast Asia from 1300 onward. Many students, especially American students, see Southeast Asia through the American-centric lens of the Vietnam War (Note that the Vietnamese call it The American War). I, myself, as a scholar focus on the region's post-colonial period, the peak of the Cold War between 1950 and 1970. Bronze Drum, by highlighting a much earlier colonization of the region by China, both appeals to my decolonizing spirit and makes visible my own historical blindspots.

The world turned its attention to Southeast Asia when its spices and trade with China made it an easy backdoor into that empire's markets, around the 1300s. But, of course, Southeast Asia existed before then, had a history before then. But excavating that history has always been problematic. For one, in the post colonial world, history has become a contested domain. Its function as a tool of nation building and national identity, coupled with the need to appease various ethnic and national factions for the sake of collective peace has obscured some histories, elevated others. The demonization of the Han Chinese in Bronze Drums would not have gone over well in another time and place, and even today, the influence of China on the region's economic and political stability is not to easily dismissed. Southeast Asia has ever been and remains, whether we like it or not, in some condition of thrall to China.

But back to history. Another reason for overlooking ancient history is that nature has not been kind to historians of the region. Much of the region's ancient histories have been difficult to document. The moist and hot climate of the region does not lend itself to the preservation of wooden or plant-based artifacts, except that which was hewn into stone. Archaeology informs us though. There were many vibrant ancient civilizations here: the Dong Son, whose drums are those featured in Bronze Drums, the Majapahit in what is now Indonesia, the Sri Vijaya in what is Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. There were Muslim sultanates later in the Philippines and the Tai Kings in Thailand, and the ancient origins of the Court of Ava in Burma (today, Myanmar). Stele and monumental building like that at Angkor or Borobodur remind the world of these past eras and peoples.

The sisters in Bronze Drum are the Trung Sisters of Vietnamese mythology and ancient history, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, who dared to subvert the Chinese Han invaders. Bronze Drum is a real history, though it is also Nguyen's fictionalized retelling of it, in the form and in the style of a mythic epic. The novel unfolds the fabric of the Dong Son/Lạc Việt world as it weaves through the Trung sisters' fight for their kingdom and culture's independence. The strength of Bronze Drum is that it reads as an epic should: it begins with the heroines just before they realize their fates, it recounts their moral turnaround, the moment they knew they had to be the leaders they became. The novel then impresses the reader with their triumphs. The novel then turns to their downfall. (I am giving nothing away here, it is well known the Viet fall to the Han and later, the French. History is the spoiler.) There is a sense of Joseph Campbell's classic hero/epic narrative structure in Nguyen's retelling, something that is sure to feel familiar to readers of Greek and Norse mythology.

But Nguyen provides the reader with more than just a myth here. Nguyen gives us insight into the interiority of the Lạc Việt actors, including the sisters who become female kings and warriors atop elephant backs, their courtiers and allies. The highlanders, Degars -- also known as người Thượng -- are featured too in Bronze Drum and the peasant community is not ignored or invisible as they are in so many heroic epics. They are as much the heroines as the Trung sisters in this novel.

If there was one flaw, I wished for more discourse on the larger political context and history of the Lạc Việt. The neighboring princes and chiefs and villages made appearances in the book, but I wanted more of that political intrigue, real politik dialogue, and sparring between characters. (I will not lie, for all their orientalist bungle, I enjoy James Clavell's Shogun and Taipan and Gai Jin, for that kind of in depth political maneuvering.)

Nonetheless, Bronze Drum is epic. And this is not its only strength.

Its characters were mostly strong women and I deeply, deeply appreciated Nguyen's feminism, bringing matriarchal lineage and culture to the forefront. The women of Bronze Drum are not frail, delicate flowers. They are not sexualized pussy cats like Richard Mason's Suzy Wong and the nameless sex worker of Full Metal Jacket fame. The women of Bronze Drum are real Asian women, made of fire and water and air and metal all at once. They are sexy and sexual beings, they have inner strength and outward muscle, they think and speak for themselves. Even as they are mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, and nieces, they are denizens and creators of their own worlds and desires.

Phong Nguyen's prose brings these heroines, these mythological warrior women to the center of the Lạc Việt world with ease. The novel flows, riverlike towards rapids, smooth and fast. The reader will want to surrender themselves to the story and let it carry them to the end.

These memories have haunted Steve Ryan, and now they haunt me too. Ryan warns the reader that the contents of this book will be dark, warns us to close it and move on if we value our peace of mind. He's right. This book will cleave to my bones like scars from bites. The murderers in Ryan's cases are depraved animals, creatures looking like humans but lacking humanity. The crimes recounted to us are sweat-inducing-chills-on-the-soles-of-my-feet terrifying. The thing is, they were committed for such trivial, banal, forgivable reasons, sometimes for no reason at all except for the purpose of inflicting pain.

Ryan weaves into his account the effect of these crimes on his psyche, giving us -- those who have not worked in policing work or its related domains -- insight into the damage being witness can cause. We don't just see the effect on Ryan, but on the entire community of those who do this work. It becomes quickly clear that this work is as emotional and psychological as it is mired in materiality: these people study the severing of a life from its body, but in this memoir we see how deeply entwined the soul is to the the gory material left behind. In a sense, the homicide detective is required to lend the dead their own soul, a poor but necessary substitute in the effort to ameliorate the injustice of the victim's murder.

The reader will weep for Ryan and for all homicide detectives as much as they weep for the victims and their families. And, let us also not forget, the families of the murderers -- in some cases, the extended family of the murdered and the murderer are one and the same, a double slice, the cut twice as deep.

Ryan takes us through six of his most memorable, most awful cases, the ones which made him value his humanity. They are baffling in different ways: How could this have happened? In some cases the murder was sudden, a crime of impulse and opportunity. In others, it was planned with meticulous attention to detail. Some murders were the inevitable outcomes of years of abuse, the eventual killing a culmination of many crimes perpetrated. The scars were not always only the fatal ones.

These cases occurred in Canada, Ryan being a detective in Toronto and serving the GTA (Greater Toronto Area), but these will be familiar to any urban resident. The cases here involved immigrants, travelers, transnational cultures and expectations, mothers, wives, husbands, lovers, children, fathers, brothers. There is the odd stranger as well, a crime committed via a random encounter by someone the victim does not know -- to be fair, the discovery of a murderer in the family can invoke a feeling of utter strangeness and dissonance, it is so unfathomable that someone we hold close and love could be capable of these kinds of crimes -- but Ryan proves to us that intimacy is not a prerequisite for really knowing the interior mind of anyone. We can never really know the person we sleep next to at night. That's the horror here. Trust is malleable in the mind and hands of murderers.

I'm glad to have read this book, chilling as its contents are. I sleep worse for it. But I a little less so because of people like Steve Ryan. I am grateful people willing and able to sacrifice a little of their soul to deliver justice to victims of crimes like these.

First, let me begin this review by stating: I WANT A COPY OF THIS BOOK. Please, Somebody, get me this for Whatever-the-Next-Gifting-Holiday-is! I also fervently hope that Duckworth Books will have this available (at a reasonable price!) through an American imprint so it can be adopted for college courses in the United States. This is the perfect book for a decolonizing history curriculum whether the course is focused on Modern Europe, Black History, History of Racism, Modern World -- or, in my case -- Roots of Contemporary Issues.

The reasons: First, the book is broken down into assignable, digestible thematic sections and chapters which focus on a single individual and their historical significance. Part One is "Context and Concealment" and it provides an overview of the state of black history in Europe and in Victorian Era historiography. Here, the point is made that the act of existing is resistance itself, it is a decolonizing act to just be. Bringing these histories to the forefront is a necessary and powerful step towards decolonizing history as it is popularly understood, historical narrative, and the academy. The following sections: "Struggle and Survival", "Church and State", "Cultural VIPs", and "Fighting for Freedom" offer well-researched deep dives into specific individuals across all classes, genders, and social positions. Working class black Britons, criminals, socialites, intellectuals, clergy, activists and freedom fighters are given a moment of spotlight and discussed as part of a larger colored and white fabric of Victorian society. This is a fantastic prosopography. And it could easily be partitioned to assign one or a few chapters per week to undergraduate students.

The second reason this book is ideal for an undergraduate seminar or an introductory survey course is because the readability of this book is amazing. Abraham's and Woolf's prose is smooth, the language requires little effort, their arguments are explicit, allowing for an easy transition from archival data to analysis to discussion. Indeed, the shift from storytelling to analysis is so seamless that many students are likely to be fooled into reading the entirety of any chapter assigned! Bonus: I bet the kids will really enjoy it. I am told over and over by students that they love seeing the "real people" in history.

The third reason is that while its accessibility makes it the perfect addition to any library, for any level of reader, it is also perfect for the more advanced historian, including those well versed in historiography and professional history production. Simply put, our own training is steeped in colonial and orientalist standards that have obscured the presence of color and ethnicity. We need to read this. I could not help but feel joy at reading this, though I am not black I am a scholar of color and from a former colony to boot! Black Victorians: Hidden in History is not the first or only of its kind, but is part of a larger movement towards decolonizing European history, which has been and remains largely as white history. Black Victorians joins Olivette Otele's African Europeans: An Untold History (2021) and Miranda Kaufman's Black Tudors: The Untold Story (2018) and others which are highlighting the transnational presence of Black people in other eras. The "Untold" theme across these recent histories is telling and a clue to the point being made: Black People never were confined to the so-called Dark Continent, that notion was a myth promulgated by a eurocentric academy, a eurocentric world -- and Here! Here is proof!

Therefore, and perhaps most significantly, Black Victorians is bound to hit with younger readers, a generation for which representation matters and matters a lot! This is for the next generation for whom the symbols and the exhibition of blackness can have an immense impact on their decisions now and in the future. Our students of color need to see themselves in their classrooms, on the big screen (by which I mean the white board and projector screen in the front of the classroom).

All this said, merely bringing black Victorians to the forefront is not the endgame. It is not the last word on this. This is only the beginning; the conclusion emphasizes not only existence of black victorians, but points out that black victorians -- black people -- have played significant roles in shaping their moment as well as the present, thus their historical existence was not static, sealed in a vacuum, but interactive and dynamically integrated with white victorian society. This is the more powerful message, one which the book manifests.

Again, please, someone, gift me a copy of this book! I will be looking for it to assign in a future course!