book review - Driven Out

Driven Out: the Forgotten War Against Chinese-Americans by Jean Pfaelzer

I don't normally choose books from the American history side of the library aisle, but nothing on the Africa or Asia shelves was catching my eye, so I picked this one up. I am very glad I did. I knew some of the history of Chinese Americans in the United States, but had no idea of the extent of the hatred and violence that was perpetrated against this particular group of people in the 1880s. Pfaelzer gives a detailed explanation of the motivations and specific actions taken against Chinese immigrants, especially in California, and takes a brutally honest look at the repercussions that still echo today.

This book made me angry and disgusted. I generally read while on the treadmill and my heartrate went higher than normal more than once while reading this book. It really brought home to me the fact that people may talk about life "in the good old days" but for many MANY people, the opposite is true. In fact, from what I can tell, it seems that being anything but rich, white, and male meant little to no justice would come your way until the later 20th century. Did you know that while the enslavement of African-Americans was made illegal in 1863, Chinese women were openly sold on the streets of San Francisco well into the 1890s? Did you know that despite mob violence that drove out thousands of Chinese sometimes overnight, little to no damages were ever paid to the people that lost their homes, lives, and property? And did you know that Chinese immigration into the United States was prohibited until 1943, in a deliberate effort to keep the Chinese people from becoming part of American life (and it was only lifted then because the US government hoped to use the Chinese to help fight against the Japanese during World War II).

This book is amazing, powerful, desperately sad, and angry. It is one of the most powerful historical books I have ever read and I would highly recommend it.

Book Review - the Last Jews of Kerala

This year is going pretty smoothly, school-wise, and I find myself without a lot of blog fodder. But I have been able to get back to reading down the history aisle at the King County Library, so I thought I would do a little book report here and there.

The Last Jews of Kerala - by Edna Fernandes

I didn't really know what to expect when I picked up this book and even getting into it I wasn't sure for the first 50-60 pages. The author writes at first as if this book is a novel. It is very descriptive, and several times she tells part of a story, hints at an issue (for example when referring to the flooding that hit Cranganore) that only gets finished 50 pages later, which is kind of annoying, but I did get into the book and it ended up being really interesting.

This is the story of one of the few Jewish settlements remaining in India. What made it more interesting to me was the fact that the area being discussed is the southwestern, or Malabar, coast of India, an area that we had just finished discussing in my world history class. The author spends time with the "white" Jews of Mattencherry, the "black" Jews of Ernakulum, and finishes by spending time with Indian Jews who emigrated to the then-new country of Israel in the late 1940s.

This book reads as a wistful and nostalgic story of a group of people that have nearly disappeared, and will probably be gone completely within 50 years. As an Indian herself, the author has a lot of sympathy for the culture and history of the area, and seems to be fluent in the language spoken in the area, which for me, made reading this more interesting.

I would recommend this book, it is not particularly scholarly, but it is interesting in a quiet, meandering, philosophical kind of way.

The Book I've Been Waiting For

I love my local library. Here in King County, they have the King County Library System, which means that I can borrow a book from ANY library in the entire county....and there are a LOT of libraries. The one in my town is one of the larger ones, and I discovered the history aisle soon after moving here, and I have been reading my way through it. Today, I checked out the education section, and found the Book I Have Been Waiting For But Didn't Know It Existed.

It is called Understanding Your Refugee and Immigrant Students by Jeffra Flaitz.

This book has all the information I ever wanted about the kids I don't understand. The author talks about 18 of the largest immigrant populations in the US and explains the cultural context they are coming from.

She first gives the usual basics about the country - capital, populaton, location, climate, etc - and then explains the historical perspective of the immigration movement to the US, as well as telling the story of a person either from that country or someone who has worked for an extended period of time in that country. In short, the story of someone who has an intimate knowledge of the particular culture. She presents deep culture beliefs, including explaining the major "tribal" divisions within the country, lists some famous proverbs (the equivalent to the American sayings like "a penny saved is a penny earned" or "the early bird gets the worm") and tells a folk tale specific to that culture.

And then...she gets to the good stuff. She explains the official educational policy of the country and explains the problems that plague that particular system. For the first time, I can see the most likely background for about half the kids in my classroom. She also explains what a school in that country would actually look like, how the teachers would dress and be perceived, and what the relationships between students and students, teachers and students, teachers and parents, and teachers and the community is. She explains what classroom discipline is like and what the kids are expected to contribute. She explains how the students are expected to learn, how they are expected to dress, and has multiple pages PER GROUP on nonverbal communication and cues. She talks about how adults are addressed and what are appropriate and inappropriate topics.

AND THERE'S MORE. She has a few pages per group on the adjustment challenges students may run into in an American school system and the solution you might try to help them adjust and a table that shows basic educational information at a glance - ages of schooling, whether attendance is mandatory, the cost of an education at a particular age, what the grading system is, what kind of exams or national tests there are, the language they use at school, and the curriculum they use.

This is the information I have been desperately seeking and not finding for the eight years I have been a teacher. This is like the magical unicorn at the end of a double rainbow with twin leprechauns.

I will be making good use of this book.

Book Reviews

I realized that I had not posted the last two book reviews from the class I took, so here they are:

Someone to Run With by David Grossman is a GREAT book. It is interesting, engaging, and just a fun read. It is a book about a girl, a boy, and a dog named Dinka in Israel (but it has nothing to do with Palestine at all). It is somewhat hard to explain the story line, but it is essentially the story of a girl named Tamar trying to rescue her brother from drug addiction and the boy named Assaf who tries to return her lost dog to her. When you start reading it, for the first half of the book you feel like you are only getting half of the story, which is true. But about halfway in, things start to fall into place and it becomes one of those books that you simply cannot put down. To put it another way, it is a book that my low-performing students would like so much they would be willing to read a "long" book (it's about 350 pages).

Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk is not a novel, like the other books I read for this class, but it is still interesting. It is the description of Istanbul by someone who lived there for pretty much his entire life and it is very good. He writes somewhat "stream of consciousness" so some people would find it hard to read, but I really liked his descriptions of the city

Scheherazade Goes West by Faterma Mernissi was recommended during this class, and I got the chance to read it this weekend. It is an absolutely fascinating look at the differences in the perception of women in the west and women in the east - but it's not what you might expect. Mernissi places a distinction between how women in the east are valued and women in the west. She points out that western men have an ideal women who is beautiful, silent, and not as smart as they are. Eastern men, on the other hand, idealize women who are intelligent and can match wits with them. She uses as an example the fact that harem women, who constantly compteted with each other for attention from the pasha, could only stand out from the rest and keep his attention if they were well-read and literate and able to mentally spar with him. She uses as an example of Scheherazade and the 1001 Nights, where the only way Scheherazade is able to stave off death, and in fact end the reign of terror instilled by the sultan's practice of marrying virgins and then killing them, was to tell 1001 consecutive stories, by which point the sultan has fallen in love with her mind, not her body. Mernissi says there is a difference between the way western men confine women (with time) and the way eastern men confine women (with space). For example, eastern women are expected to wear veils in public. "Public" is public space - which is how eastern men confine women. Western men have a certain expectation of how women are supposed to look (young and beautiful), which is how they confine women with time. If you aren't a certain age or look a certain way (usually tied to age), you are no longer good for anything. I took it a step further and thought that this might be why western women are drawn to eastern men - who traditionally (although possibly unconsciously) value the mind rather than the body. I highly recommend this book.

Book Reviews 5 and 6

So...two more books down for this upcoming class next week.

The first one is called Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif, and was translated into English by Peter Theroux. It is about the transformation of a wadi in the Arabian peninsula as the Americans come in search of oil in the 1930s. It is somewhat meandering and a bit difficult to follow the very large cast of characters, but it does somewhat reflect the changes taking place in Arab society as a small oasis with a few families scatters and becomes part of a larger urban environment as the oil pipeline is built. It also talks about the destruction of the environment and the small settlements as the Americans come in, and the changes to the very traditional way of life that are inevitable as the two distinctly different societies rub up against each other. It is easy to see the birth of the fundamentalist movement here and why the roots of many of the international problems of today started in this time period. I liked the book better as I got further into it, but it was pretty hard to get into and it took me more than 2 weeks to read it. It wsa also the longest of the seven books at 625 pages. As previously stated, the large cast of characters, and the different names that are used throughout for the same person make the storyline somewhat difficult to follow and the plotline wanders around quite a bit. It is almost like reading a bunch of interconnected short stories. One other thing that I did not really like about this book was that there are no women mentioned, other than the wife and mother of two of the main characters, and she goes mute from some unmentioned disease and after that point is portrayed only as desperately clinging to her son for two or three pages and then is not mentioned after that point. Other than that, no women are mentioned by name and the only other women mentioned are American women, who are portrayed as naked whores who come ashore in a special ship for a couple of days, inspire grumbling and anger in the Arabs, who can only see them from a very great distance, and then leave. Conclusion - not my favorite book, but interesting and can grow on you.

The second book is titled The Yacoubian Building, by Alaa al Aswany. It is much shorter, only 246 pages, and I really liked it. Just like Palace Walk (reviewed in a previous post) it is about Cairo, Egypt during a time of transition, only unlike Palace Walk it is about Egypt in 1990, and how the residents of a building called the Yacoubian Apartment Building deal with life over the course of a year or so. One teenaged couple splits up after the woman's father suddenly dies, and the woman becomes more modern and rebellious and eventually begins an affair with a much older man, while the young man becomes attracted to fundamentalist Islam at a time when that particular group of people was intensely angered by the American presence in Saudi Arabia and their war with Saddam Hussein in the first Persian Gulf War. Another resident was a corrupt politician who is willing to do whatever it takes, including murder, bigamy, and bribery in order to gain power. These are only three of the 10 or so interwoven stories which altogether make up a very complex picture of life in Egypt less than 20 years ago. I really liked this book, despite the occasionally overt sexual descriptions, and I would recommend it, especially if you know any Egyptians, as I do.

AP for the commoners

AP stands for "Advanced Placement" and is a high school class which can get a student college credit. Having been in both high school and college at various times in my life, I can tell you that the class is more strenuous than any basic college level class, and most of my upper level college classes as well. It is pretty rough, and asking a 16 year old kid to do what they are expected to do on the AP test is pretty impressive. So I am doing the training to teach the class, even though I have no intention of teaching AP. It is interesting to learn the information and teaching methods, even though sometimes I thought, "there is no way my kids could ever do what this woman's students can do..."

Also...I previously posted reviews of two of the books that I have to read this summer. Here are the next two. The first book is called Origins of the Modern World by Robert Marks, which I had to read for this AP training, and the second is called Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, which is one of the seven novels I have to read for the Teacher's Institute.

Origins of the Modern World is really interesting. The book is about the rise of the West, and in short, Marks states that the West got lucky. He talks about how Eastern civilization, especially India and China, was equivalent, and even more advanced that Western civilization until the start of the Industrial Age. But with the invention of coal-powered machinery and factories, England suddenly gained the upper hand since their tiny, natural-resource depleted island just happened to be sitting on the world's most accessible source of coal. In addition, Marks states that Indian Ocean trading societies such as the Indians, Chinese, Arabia, and East Africa saw the benefit to peaceful (free) trade, and this is the reason that for the most part, these societies were not particularly imperialistic while at the same time they were powerful. He states that because Western European societies were more likely to fight with their neighbors, they carried that attitude over into their dealings with the East when they found their way through the Indian Ocean, and at a time when most Western European powers were actually weaker than their African and Asian counterparts, Western Europe was able to easily conquer Asia and Africa. I like what he has to say, especially the first section of the book, which deals with the world pre-1400. He points out that there was no dominant world power, and in fact there were 8 centers of power that slightly overlapped each other, with the outlying areas providing support to the more powerful and urbanized centers. I do recommend this book for world history teachers, and anyone interested in history in general.

Season of Migration to the North is a novel, and I neither liked it or understood it (and I know, those two facts are definitely related). It is about a man in the Sudan during the 1930s or so (it never says for sure) who returns to his village after traveling to England to study for several years. When he returns, there is a new and mysterious stranger in the village, who no one knows much about. The author feels drawn to the stranger, especially after a night of drunkenness when the stranger begins reciting modernist poetry in flawless English. The stranger finally tells the author his story, which involves the stranger also studying and eventually teaching in London, and along the way feeling compelled to seduce several women, who all then commit suicide. Then comes one particular woman who refuses to fall under his spell, which of course means that he can't stop pursuing her. She drives him crazy, they eventually marry, and according to him, she convinces him to stab her to death (I think, this is where things get a little fuzzy for me), and he is put on trial for the previous suicides and the homicide. The book is written a little bit "stream of consciousness" and so it is hard to follow sometimes. Meanwhile, the stranger disappears after telling the author his story, and leaves his wife and children under the care of the author. An older man in the village, who has been repeatedly married and divorced, wants the woman, but although her father has agreed, she refuses to marry him, until he forces her to do so. She won't let the old man touch her, until one night he insists, and both she and the old man end up dead - she stabbed repeatedly through the heart, he because she cut off his penis and he bleeds to death. Of course, all of this is accompanied by quite a bit of extraneous description of the actual sex process throughout the book. I was mostly confused by the book and not very impressed. I know I am a history teacher and not an English teacher, but I still am not sure why we were supposed to read this book. I do not recommend it, although after we study it in class, I may update this post with a modified review.

Knee Deep in Words

A few weeks ago, one of the higher echelon people at school sent everyone in the social studies department an email listing a bunch of classes available around Seattle this summer. There were several interesting prospects, including one through the Seattle Art Museum and one through the national archives. I, of course, was looking for something free. So I picked out one class that was titled "Teaching Middle Eastern history using Arab Fiction," and applied, and got accepted. Cool.

I began to get emails from a woman at the University of Washington about this class, which apparently is part of a series that is offered to high school teachers every summer. It is a two week class in July, 3 hours a day for 10 days. I thought that it would involve short stories, and older literature, from the 1700s or 1800s, but then last week I got a box.

In that box were 7 novels, all written in the 20th century, all dealing with various areas of the Middle Eastern world, and all but one between 300 and 400 pages. My first thought was "holy COW this is a lot of reading, even for me!" Also included was a syllabus, and I got another syllabus a few days later. I started reading last weekend, and so far, the first two books have been pretty good.

I really liked the first book, called Leo Africanus by Amin Maalouf. It is about a Muslim guy who was born in Spain just before the Spanish kicked the Jews and Muslims out of Spain (1480s and 90s, for you non-nerds). He talks about Granada, and then Fez (Algeria), Cairo, and Rome...all places he ends up living over the course of the first 40 or so years of his life. It is a novel, so it is fiction, but I thought it was absolutely fascinating, and it was definitely a different point of view than I had ever really considered before. Generally we think about the Spanish Inquisition either from the Protestant point of view or from the Native American point of view, but I have never consciously considered it from the Muslim, Jewish, or African point of view. I really, really liked the book.

The second book I read was called Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz and is part of a trilogy about an Egyptian family that is set between 1917 and 1952. Palace Walk is the first book and is about Egypt at the end of World War I, and the events that take place while Egyptian nationalism is growing. Again, I had never consciously considered the post-war British occupation from the Egyotian point of view and while I did find that part of the book intensely interesting, I did not really like this book. The father is an extremely strict Muslim who confines his wife and daughters (and later his daughter-in-law) to the house. His wife has not been outside the front door in 25 years. He has absolute authority over the house, to the point of forbidding his family to laugh at his daughter's wedding. He takes pride in his devotion to God and his blameless life, as evidenced by his family's conservativeness. But this same man is considered the life of the party to his friends, goes out drinking every night, and has had multiple affairs. Despite this, he actually kicks his wife out of the house because she went to the mosque one day without his permission, and threatened to divorce her for being "wanton." I did not particularly care for this book, it made me angry at times and made me want to yell at the characters to stand up for themselves and fight back! However, as I previously stated, this book is part of a series, that apparently follows the same family through three generations and maybe it gets better or makes more sense as a trilogy. The history part of it was absolutely fascinating, however.

I haven't read the other books, so when I do I will post a review, but they are Season of Migration to the North by Tayyib Salih, Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif, The Yacoubian Building by Alaa al Aswany, Someone to Run With by David Grossman, and Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk.