Text & Photos: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Dragon/License Plate Photo: Brayan Collazo

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I’m not a regular reader of fiction. I find real life far too interesting.

But it was my interest in real life—specifically, my own work interviewing Chinese Cubans in Havana that began in 2008—that led me to Daina Chaviano’s novel, The Island of Eternal Love, translated into English by Andrea G. Labinger and published by Penguin’s imprint, Riverhead Books, in 2008.

The novel isn’t specifically about Chinese Cubans. In fact, it’s about what Chaviano refers to as “the three origins…of the Cuban nation” (Spanish, African, and Chinese). But it may just be the first novel published in English that includes the Chinese Cuban community in Havana as one of its principal subjects.

Though the rest of the world is largely unaware of the fact, Chinese immigrants began arriving in Cuba’s capital and main port city by the thousands in the 1840s, lured by promises of work and financial stability, which were lacking at home. (Francisco’s maternal and paternal grandparents were among the Chinese immigrants). Today, there are more than 10,000 living descendants of these immigrants on the island, Jorge Chao, secretary of the Casino Chung Wah, a social club for Chinese Cubans in Havana’s Chinatown, told me when I interviewed him last May.

Chao talked about the hardships Chinese immigrants faced, and these are rendered accurately in Chaviano’s novel—the decision to change Chinese names to Spanish names to gain acceptability in Cuban society; the difficulty of integrating into a culture whose sounds, sights and tastes were frustratingly foreign; the social isolation young Chinese immigrants experienced in schools; and the self-imposed isolation the Chinese Cubans experienced when they clustered in cultural enclaves intended to foster mutual aid and maintain traditions.

For the reader unfamiliar with Cuban history and culture, these details are likely to come as interesting surprises. Chaviano peppers the novel with historically correct details that are also wonderfully evocative—the smell of steaming pork buns and fish soup, the symbolism of the Chinese lottery—still played in Cuba today–, and the inclusion of Cuban sayings that reveal how Chinese Cubans were both integrated into and isolated from the dominant culture.

Despite Chaviano’s firm grasp of Chinese Cuban history and culture, the novel can be difficult to follow. The author introduces more than two dozen characters, located in or evoking four countries and one continent (Spain, Cuba, China, the US, and Africa), all spanning several generations. Even the most interested reader may have a hard time keeping track, but for the reader lacking any point of reference about Cuban history, I wonder if the novel may feel more onerous to read than pleasurable.

There’s also the issue of the writing. The Island of Eternal Love is really about the main character, Cecilia, a Cuban American journalist living in Miami who is desperate to understand herself, her history, and the mystery of a ghost house that appears and disappears in various locations in south Florida. Cecilia becomes interested in new agey mysticism as a means of resolving these tensions, and the novel begins to feel weighted with clichés about crystals, auras, and women who see or intuit things about others that remain obscure to the person affected. The effort, it seems, is to evoke a sense of the mysterious that does—as any visitor to Cuba can attest– seem to shroud the island and Havana in particular. But the metaphor feels too obvious, too forced. Unfortunately, there are many instances of these all too obvious “as if by magic” narrative devices. Perhaps they read more convincingly in the original Spanish, but they often seem silly in the English translation.

Still, the book is a worthwhile read, especially for those with an interest in and basic knowledge of Cuba. It may be most appropriate for Cuban Americans, many of whom are likely to recognize the complexity of their own experiences and emotions in Cecilia’s character. For other readers, sticking around for the ending may be a challenge, but if you can forgive the occasionally affected language, The Island of Eternal Love is an engaging and worthwhile read, a fictional account that brings some fascinating and overlooked aspects of Cuban history to life.

A few months back, an American friend who was thinking of moving to Mexico’s Baja California region recounted her experience of home-hunting with a real estate agent.

She’d explained to the agent in advance that she is the kind of person who really immerses herself in local culture, so she wasn’t looking for a luxury condo or a gated community.

Nonetheless, when she arrived in Baja, my friend was given a tour of condos where Mexican maids come in and fold towels in elaborate shapes– swans, flowers, and all manner of objects that appear impossible to my own fumbling fingers. The agent explained, with some degree of pride, that American expats had created these lovely gated communities where they could “be assured of water and electricity.”

The local Mexicans, meanwhile, had to haul buckets to a water truck a few times a week–if it came rolling through town at all–to source water, as the American expats had diverted the water to their own neighborhood.

My friend talked about her meeting with the expats, who complained about the loud music of locals, explained that their community policy prohibited Mexicans from living amongst them because “they have a ton of people in one home,” warned about going to the “Mexican” store for food rather than the “American” store, and who proudly flaunted the fact that they spoke little or no Spanish.

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I’ve been thinking about these folks as I immerse myself in Mexico’s classical and contemporary literature, which has a rich, respectable, and long history. If I could recommend a few books American expats in Mexico should read, they’d include:

-Instrucciones Para Vivir en Mexico: by Jorge Ibarguengoitia
Translated literally, the title means Instructions for Living in Mexico. Far from being a how-to book, the late Ibarguengoitia, a journalist, brought his astute and acerbic wit to the page in order to offer a close-up examination on Mexican life. Though many of the short essays (most no more than 2 pages) were written in the 1970s, they remain powerfully relevant today. My favorite essays are in the section about bureaucracy and an essay about Mexican car horns. This book is great for the American who really wants to get beneath the surface of Mexican social and political life; it’s historical without being overly didactic, and it’s often quite funny.

-The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics (The Latin America Readers): This anthology, published by Duke University Press, is a sweeping yet comprehensive overview of some of the most important historical and literary documents from Mexico’s history. The book is great to pull off a shelf and open to any page; consider it your daily lesson in Mexican history and culture. It’s also in English, so you’ve got no language barrier excuses!

-Africa en Mexico: by Marco Polo Hernandez Cuevas
Not all Mexicans know about the Afro-Mexican populations that live in Mexico’s coastal areas, but Marco Polo Hernandez Cuevas, a professor, specializes in the subject and has written several books about Afro-Mexicans. This one, in Spanish, is a great primer on the subject.

There are numerous other books I’d recommend, including cookbooks, art books, and memoirs, but these are a great start for the American who has recently arrived in Mexico. With the exception of The Mexico Reader, these books can be tough to find in the U.S. and online. In Mexico City, check the bookstore in the Palacio de Bellas Artes and the bookstore at the Cineteca Nacional, both of which have an extensive and impressive collection.

Are you an American expat in Mexico? What books would you add to this list?
Photo: Texas to Mexico (creative commons)

That’s Jay Rayner. It’s tough to eat for a living.

“I should be hating this book,” I thought to myself guiltily as I enjoyed every single page of Jay Rayner’s recently published foodie memoir, The Man Who Ate the World.

A few months back, you see, I penned a rather negative review ofThe Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner, and in many ways the premise and structure of Rayner’s book are not so different. Both authors were on transcontinental searches for sublime experiences: Rayner, a food critic, through food; Weiner, a journalist, through a rather pseudo-scientific approach to the elusive notion of happiness. Both men organized their chapters by countries visited, and both authors were deeply self-absorbed and not ashamed to admit it.

So what was the difference?

Well, there were a few. For one thing, Rayner is much funnier. “I eat,” he says, beginning to describe a meal at a high-end restaurant in New York. The sensation of the dish on his palate is “both luxuriously adult and a trip to the nursery. It is both comforting and filthy rude,” an observation that only a Brit—which Rayner is– may be capable of making.

He’s also a very good writer. It’s not easy to write fresh prose about food, but when he describes snails that “looked like big fat commas,” you know that this guy not only appreciates the taste of food, but is passionate about its other properties as well.

But the key difference is that Rayner achieves—and seemingly without trying—what Weiner tried to do but could not: balance the compelling genre of the memoir and the inherent self-absorption of that medium with interesting experiences and powerful flashes of insight that occur with just enough frequency to make reading the book worthwhile.

In the opening, Rayner sets forth his mission, which sounds sober enough: to answer “a few questions…: How much can we really learn about the world in which we live from the food that arrives on our plate? Is it moral to eat well while others starve? And is globalization…threatening to extinguish the flame of unique creativity that has…long burned in the hearts of the world’s great chefs?” He will struggle with these questions—though not so painfully obviously as Weiner does with similar questions in his book—throughout his journey. And because he doesn’t turn away from that struggle, but rather tries to understand it without wringing his hands about it, the reader sees that Rayner’s journey isn’t quite as self-centered as it might seem at times.

Rayner can be ruthlessly catty about chefs, other food critics, and just about anyone he meets. Yet his eye for detail is so fine that I’m inclined to forgive him when he describes one of the world’s most renowned chefs with the funny yet unnecessary description of “a squashed face, as if somebody had inadvertently folded away the middle…and a monkish air, as if a part of his personality has also been folded away.” He’s forgiven because he follows these overly candid impressions that should have gone through his social propriety filter with astute observations about places and food that help even the most well-traveled, well-fed reader learn something new. Who knew that Muscovites adore sushi or that it’s as dangerous to be a restaurant owner or chef in Moscow as it is to be a rabble-rousing journalist?

He’s also forgiven because when he eats “what may well be a perfect meal,” this most sublime food experience is as ethereal for the reader as it is for Rayner. In Tokyo, Rayner lucks his way into the exclusive world of restaurants run out of apartments, Japanese supper clubs of sorts, where a bill for one person can easily run just shy of four digits… and that’s without a comma or dot. These are restaurants for the Japanese upper crust, and foreigners– even those with wealth or connections– rarely pass their thresholds.

Rayner’s description of the meal is Faulkneresque in length, but is only the more appealing for being so, because his lingering detail confirms that the experience was as special as he says it was. “It begins,” he says simply, belying the vivid descriptions that will follow. He is served raw venison “the color of a fresh hemorrhage,” fish whose sweetness is “undercut by the sudden, life-affirming bitterness of the guts,” and, after some other dishes that are “hugely satisfying,” an understated yet entirely appropriate finish of “lipstick-red strawberries with sake ice cream” and a “lotus root jelly that tastes calmingly of tea.” In his rich descriptions, Rayner has taken the reader deep into a certain slice of Japanese culture that is not easily accessible—if at all—to even well-heeled travelers.

But finally, Rayner’s book is so exquisite because it is so thoughtful. This man who has seemed to skewer either the personality or the physique of everyone he has met—sparing no one, including himself—from his poison pen, who has willingly accepted free meals and free lodging and has indulged in dinners that could feed entire communities; who has single-handedly emitted enough carbon in his travels to depopulate a small forest; who has eaten so much that by the end of the book the very joy and sheen of eating have worn off quite a bit, has bursts of razor-sharp social commentary that leave the reader thinking about topics as diverse as the way in which the Internet has changed cultural production and social criticism; the notion of what constitutes authenticity; what “local” means and how high-end restaurants and their patrons are wreaking environmental havoc the world over; and how the exploitation of migrant workers perpetuates much of the modern machinery of commerce.

The book is as hugely satisfying as Rayner’s near perfect meal, and the reader is plenty full, savoring the serious and important questions that Rayner raises, all the while enjoying the bright, popping flavors of the more entertaining bits.

BONUS! If you’d like me to send you my review copy of The Man Who Ate the World, please leave a comment below and tell us about the best meal you’ve ever eaten. Where was it? What was it? I’ll be sure to get in touch with you for your mailing address and ship the book your way!

Jay Rayner Photo: mariagluc (Flickr)
Escargot Photo: Ramon2002 (Flickr)
Tokyo Photo: zrrdavatz (Flickr)