Books Set in Asia: Northern Countries

Book Summary

This historical novel is based on the real-life and memoir of a 15th-century female physician in China. Tan Yunxian was raised in the Ming Dynasty era by her grandmother, also a physician, who taught her the art of Chinese medicine. Additionally, she learned about female conditions from her best friend, Meiling, who was training to be a midwife. While Yunxian was on the path to be a success in her own right, she was still sent into an arranged marriage.

Her new mother-in-law was a traditionalist who forbade her from seeing Meiling and stopped her from helping the girls and women in their household. Instead, she is supposed to be a “proper wife,” learning poetry, embroidering foot-binding slippers, and staying within the walls of their compound.

How did Yunxian break free and go on to treat women from all classes of society and create remedies that are still used over 500 years later? Lisa See tells her compelling life story in this novel.

Book Summary

This split-time historical fiction alternates between 1930s Japan, beginning in Mineko’s childhood, and 1990s Texas, where we see Mineko’s story as a grandmother through the eyes of her granddaughter, Lia.

In 1999, Lia is a 25 year old promising architect in Austin, but has just moved back home to the small ranching town of Curtain, Texas. Her new roommate is her prickly 73 year old grandmother, Mineko (Minnie). While the duo hadn’t been close previously, they began bonding through late-night conversations.

Mineko begins revealing stories of her childhood in pre-war Tokyo, along with stories of the war, a man named Akio Sato, and an abandoned Japanese country estate they called the Turtle House. As Lia begins learning about her grandmother’s past before becoming a war bride and coming to the US, she recognizes that she also needs to come clean about her own surprising return home.

Book Summary

Maggie is a widowed 30-something food writer who has just learned about a paternity claim against her husband’s estate. The claim originated in China, and she immediately travels to Beijing to investigate. When she requested time off from her job at a food magazine for the trip, instead of agreeing, they ask her to profile rising Chinese culinary star Sam Liang while she is in Beijing.

Sam unexpectedly becomes her guide through China as she tries to unravel her husband’s past. With the help of Sam and his family, she quickly begins to be transformed by local cuisine and is drawn deep into a world of food rooted in centuries of history and philosophy.

Book Summary

While civil war was ravaging the Chinese countryside, in rural Shandong, the wealthy Ang family was more concerned with the lack of an heir after the mother had produced only four daughters.

As the Communist Army gets closer to Shandong, the males leave the four useless girls and their mother behind. When the land-seizing cadres arrive, they normally choose a male from the family to punish for the family’s “crimes”. With the men gone, the cadres pick oldest daughter Hai instead, and she barely survives the brutality.

After this, the hungry and penniless women know they must escape rather than risk another attack. The five women trek over 1000 miles from their countryside home to the bustling city of Qingdao, then onward to British Hong Kong and eventually Taiwan. While they’ve lost their home, they also begin to discover the new freedoms that come when they are seen as people, not just as their gender.

Book Summary

Naoko is a seventeen-year-old girl in 1957 Japan whose family has prearranged a marriage for her that will secure their family’s status. But Naoko wants to marry for love, and she’s fallen for an American sailor. When her family finds out that she is pregnant with the sailor’s child, she is cast out in disgrace and forced to make an unimaginable choice.

In present-day America, Tori finds a letter that contains a shocking revelation. In her quest to learn the truth, she travels to a remote seaside village in Japan.

Book Summary

This novel follows three generations of a Chinese family as they search for a place to call home. In China in 1938, Meilin is a young wife with a bright future. But when the Japanese army approaches, she is forced to flee with her 4-year-old son Renshu. With nothing but an illustrated scroll that depicts ancient fables, as Meilin travels from rural China to Shanghai to Taiwan, these fables are interwoven into the novel.

Years later, Renshu has settled in the US under the name Henry Dao. Despite his daughter Lily’s desire to understand her heritage, he refuses to share any information about his childhood. He believes that the only way to keep his family safe is to shield them from their history.

Book Summary

Alva is 14 years old in 2007 and lives in Shanghai with her American ex-pat mother. She’s never known her Chinese father, and is looking forward to a better life in America. However, her hopes of a big move are dashed when her mother announces that she is engaged to their wealthy Chinese landlord, Lu Fang. Instead of immigrating to the US, Alva settles on attending the American School in Shanghai, but soon learns it’s much different than she expected.

The story alternates between Alva’s point of view in 2007 and the POV of her new stepfather from his younger days in 1985. At that time, Lu Fang was a young married shipping clerk in the seaside city of Qingdao. While he grew up with big dreams, he became one of the many casualties in his country’s harsh political reforms. His world changed again when he met an American woman who made him confront difficult questions about his status in life.

Book Summary

Kimi is a high school student who aspires to attend art school. Her mother is a well-known painter who wants Kimi to follow in her fine art footsteps, but Kimi has become much more drawn to fashion design – a field that her mother strongly disapproves of.

After an explosive fight with her mom, Kimi receives a letter from her estranged Japanese grandparents inviting her to visit them in Kyoto for spring break. Even though she’s never met them, she sees it as the perfect opportunity to escape her troubles at home.

When she arrives in Japan, the cultural customs and language and completely familiar to her – as are her grandparents. Soon she discovers that inspiration is everywhere – from Kyoto’s outdoor markets, art installations, and the cherry blossom festival. She meets a young man named Akira – an aspiring med student – who helps to show her even more of the city.

As the week goes on, Kimi gets to know her grandparents and learns so much more about both her mother back in America, herself, and her art.

Book Summary

When Tang Yitian’s mother calls him frantically saying that his father has disappeared, he returns to his family’s rural China village for the first time in ten years. The family has been estranged during his decade in America, making it difficult for Yitian to understand what has happened. 

The search is complicated by his mother’s evasiveness and China’s impenetrable bureaucracy. His only hope is to reconnect with a childhood friend, Tian Hanwen. The friends dreamt of attending university together, but while Yitian ended up a professor in America, Hanwen was left behind and resigned to live as a midlevel bureaucrat’s wealthy housewife.

Now adults, the duo must figure out who Yitian’s father really was. Their search spans rural provinces and big cities, providing an up-close look at much of 20th-century China.

Book Summary

This North Korean book is the memoir of Hyeonseo Lee, who shares the harsh realities of growing up under the secretive and brutal communist regime. She was raised to believe that her home country was “the best on the planet,” but the famine of the 1990s began to open her eyes. Her home was located near the Chinese border, which gave her small glimpses of the outside world that most of her fellow citizens never saw. That, combined with the poverty and starvation they suffered for years, allowed her to realize that she and her family had been brainwashed by her government.

At age seventeen, Lee decided to escape North Korea. She details her terrifying struggle to avoid capture by the ruthless dictatorship. It then took more than a decade for her to reunite with her family and help guide them to freedom as well.

Book Summary

This is a moving and suspenseful drama that provides a good look into contemporary Korean culture.

Min was born and raised in California by an American father and a Korean mother. Growing up, he always felt “too Korean” to fit in. When he takes a job working in Seoul, he looks forward to exploring his Korean heritage.

There he meets and begins dating Yu-jin, a happy, confident, and ambitious young woman who will soon graduate from university and embark on the future she’s been dreaming of.

When Seoul police inform Min that Yu-jin has committed suicide, he’s certain that can’t be true, and he’s determined to find out the truth. He soon learns that Yu-jin’s life was much more complicated than he knew. Her father is a powerful government official, and she had a fraught friendship with her destructive roommate, So-ra.

This story is told in alternating chapters from both Min and Yu-lin’s perspectives. As Min begins to doubt everything he thought he knew about Yu-jin, he must also do a lot of soul-searching regarding his own bi-cultural identity.

Book Summary

Award-winning journalist Barbara Demick’s reporting allows us to explore one of the most hidden corners of the world. The Tibetan town of Ngaba is perched at eleven thousand in elevation, and it’s one of the first places where the Tibetans and Chinese communists encountered one another in the 1930s.

During the Chinese Civil War, the hungry Red Army took refuge in Ngaba where they looted monasteries and ate religious statues made from flour and water (which to Tibetans was as if they were eating the Buddha).

In this book, which spans several decades and also looks back at Tibetan history, Demick follows the private lives of a wide array of Tibetan citizens – including a princess, a nomad, a poet, a schoolgirl, and an upwardly mobile entrepreneur. Through their eyes, we learn about life in Tibet during the 21st century, and we see each of them face the same dilemma: whether to hold onto their Buddhist teachings of nonviolence or join the Chinese.

Book Summary

In this biography, author Zhuqing Li shares the story of her aunts. These sisters were divided by the Chinese Civil War in the 1940s. By a quirk of timing, Jun ended up on an island under Nationalist control, and then settled in Taiwan, married a Nationalist general, and lived among fellow exiles at odds with everything the new Communist regime stood for on the mainland. However, her sister Hong, a doctor, was on the mainland at the end of the war. She was forced to publicly disavow both her own family background and her sister’s decision to abandon the party.

Both women were determined to create successful careers and families amid political upheaval and against all odds. This personal story shares both sisters’ resilience, but it’s also a primer on the rocky relationship between Taiwan and China.

Book Summary

The Akha people live in a remote mountain village in China, where, for generations, their lives have revolved around farming tea. Li-yan is one of the few educated girls in the village, and everything begins to change for her when a stranger arrives at the village gate driving a jeep—the first automobile any of them have ever seen. Little by little, Li-yan begins to reject the customs of her village.

When Li-yan becomes pregnant out of wedlock, local tradition calls for her to give her child over to be killed. Instead, she flees to a nearby city, where she leaves her baby at an orphanage. She then remains in the city and puts her experience and education to use by pursuing a career in the tea business outside of the fields.

Li-yan’s daughter is adopted by loving American parents and is raised in a life of privilege in California. As she grows, she continues to wonder about her origins, and back in China, the mother she never knew longs for her as well. The two remain connected across the continents by their family heritage of tea.

Book Summary

Sydney Moore is a California teenager whose parents have suddenly shipped her off to spend her senior year with her wealthy godparents, the Kims, in South Korea with no further explanation. The Kims run an important company, and they’re never home. Instead, they’ve tasked their son, Chul, with helping Sydney adjust to life at the elite Daeshim Academy. 

Chul has no interest in playing chaperone to an American girl. That is, until his rival, Gun, starts hanging around. Sydney thinks Gun is a nice guy, but Chul has reason to think otherwise, and he’s determined to protect Sydney. 

Things are complicated further when Sydney’s mom cuts off contact, and Sydney finally begins to uncover the real reason her parents sent her away.

Book Summary

This non-fiction book by Hong Kong journalist Karen Cheung provides a modern insider’s account of Hong Kong. Cheung came of age in the wake of Hong Kong’s reunification with China in 1997. 

In this memoir, she introduces us to the tenacious counterculture and the robust underground music scene. She also explores the unique history of youth-led protests. Drawing from her own experience, as well as from interviews with musicians, protesters, and writers who have made Hong Kong their home, Cheung helps us to better understand her home at a critical moment in history – both for Hong Kong and democracies around the world.

Book Summary

When Anna’s adoptive mother passes away, she decides to travel to Korea to track down her birth mother. At the orphanage, she’s devasted to learn that her birth mother is also already gone.

Then, a stranger hands Anna a package containing an antique comb and an address. She’s led to the home of Hong Jae-hee, who shares her family history, which includes the Japanese occupation of Korea during WW2. Jae-hee was one of the 200,000 Korean women forced to serve Japanese soldiers as “comfort women”.

While this challenging story is fiction, it’s based on the true events of little-known comfort women. The treatment of these women was horrific, and their stories must be shared instead of buried.

Book Summary

Amaterasu Takahashi lost her daughter and grandson in 1945 when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. So imagine her disbelief when, 40 years later, a man knocks on the door of her Philadelphia home, claiming to be her grandson. He is badly scarred and has in his possession a collection of sealed private letters.

Ama now finds herself face to face with the painful memories from the years before WWII. Memories of the daughter she tried too hard to protect and the love affair that drove them apart, and memories of her own younger years pouring sake at a hostess bar where Ama first learned that a soft heart was a dangerous thing.

Along with the memories, Ama must confront the painful family secrets that she tried to leave behind when she fled Japan all those years ago.

Book Summary

Award-winning journalist Barbara Demick has written one of the best books on North Korea that takes us deep inside the secretive country to shed light on what life is like under a repressive totalitarian regime.

In this book, her reporting follows six average North Korean citizens over the course of a fifteen-year period that covers the death of Kim Il-sung, the rise to power of Kim Jong-il, and the famine that killed one-fifth of the North Korean population.

Life looks very different in a country that is not connected to the Internet, where radios and TVs are limited to one government-controlled station, and where you can be punished for showing affection, yet in some ways, the human experience is also the same.

Unlike many other books about life in North Korea, Demick’s work allows us to see these six North Koreans through the everyday experiences of falling in love and raising families. However, we also see them struggling for survival, and one by one, they experience moments when they realize that their government has betrayed them.

Book Summary

In the late 1930s, China welcomed Jewish Europeans trying to flee Hilter. In this book, one of those refugees, Romy, meets a local, Li, and the young girls develop a quick friendship. You’ll feel like you’re in Shanghai as the girls explore the city together. Unfortunately, the realities of World War II begin to overshadow their friendship.

You’ll also meet Alexandra, a British girl who visited her grandparents, Romy and Wilhelm, in Australia in 2016. As she learns about her family history, she’s compelled to visit Shanghai herself, determined to understand more.

Family secrets, friendship, and courage fill the pages of this split-timeline book. It also shares the little-known history of Jewish refugees who fled to Shanghai and the effects of Japanese control of China during the war.

Book Summary

One of the great, and often unspoken, tragedies of our lifetime has been the ongoing genocide of the Uyghur people group in China. The author of this memoir, Nury Turkel, was born in 1970 in a “re-education” camp. He was lucky to survive and escape and used the opportunity to become the first Uyghur to receive an American law degree.

This powerful memoir shares details of what has happened to the estimated three million people who have been killed or enslaved in camps like the one the author experienced. While this can be a tough read, we think it’s important to understand the horror of what is still an ongoing humanitarian crisis & genocide in 2023. 

Book Summary

Korea’s Jeju Island has a fascinating real-life history of female deep-sea free divers called Haenyeo, who collect seaweed, clams, and abalone. Inspired by this history, this novel tells the story of Mi-ja and Young-sook – two best friends who come from very different backgrounds despite both growing up on the island of Jeju. As soon as they are old enough, they take their place as “baby divers” in the village’s all-female diving operation, which is led by Young-sook’s mom. This is the beginning of a life of excitement and responsibility for the two friends, but also a life filled with danger.

The Island of Sea Women takes place over many decades, beginning in the 1930s, throughout WWII and the Korean War, and all the way up to the era of cell phones.

Over the years, the residents of Jeju are caught between warring empires, which often makes it difficult for Mi-ja and Young-soon to ignore their differences – especially when Mi-ja’s father becomes a Japanese collaborator. As the years go on, forces beyond their control will drive their friendship to a breaking point.

Book Summary

Set in modern-day Mongolia, a Buddhist monk and his identical twin brother (who has renounced his monastic life in favor of Western ways) set out on a quest to find the next great lama. As they travel across the beautiful and varied landscape, from the Gobi Desert to the ancient capital of Chinggis Khan, the brothers – who can hear each other’s thoughts – contemplate questions of the immortal soul, as well as more earthly matters, such of love, sex, and brotherhood.

Through this novel, the author includes a lot of details about Mongolia’s geography, culture, and history, and also provides readers an education of Buddhism. It provides a “stunningly far-flung examination of our individual struggle to retain faith and discover meaning in a fast-changing world, and a paean to Buddhist acceptance of what simply is.”

Book Summary

Despite being the 9th largest country in the world (by square miles), little is known about life in Kazakhstan. In this travel memoir, Christopher Robbins explores the hugely varied landscape, mixing humor and history along the way. With topics ranging from apple orchards to gulags (labor camps), this book is the perfect primer about the country.

This book focuses heavily on the history of the region, without as much travel narrative and interaction with locals as you find in some travel memoirs.

NOTE: There is some criticism that the book highlights the positive aspects of then-President Nursultan Ábishuly Nazarbayev without giving the full picture, so additional research may be needed before forming a full opinion of him.

Book Summary

Do you enjoy offbeat travel memoirs and dry British wit? Stans by me will take you along author Ged Gillmore’s trip through Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

He documents the landscapes and ancient traditions he encounters at each stop along the way. You’ll feel like you’ve visited Central Asia by the time you’re done reading, and may even add one or more of his destinations to your bucket list.

His travel companions from his bus tour are fascinating characters on their own and add another level to his stories.

Book Summary

As you read, you’ll get a good sense of what it’s like to live in these countries today through her meetings with locals. Each encounter helps explain the countries’ complexity and what their citizens have endured, whether they’re fighting for human rights or victims of bride snatching.

While Stans By Me is a witty travelogue of a group travel tour, Sovietistan is a journalistic travel memoir of the same countries by Erika Fatland, a social anthropologist. Her journey is focused on discovering how the Soviet roots of the Stans have influenced the countries well after they became free in 1991.

Book Summary

This sweeping, literary historical fiction will take readers from the perfumed chambers of a courtesan school in Pyongyang to the glamorous cafes of a modernizing Seoul and the boreal forests of Manchuria. 

In 1917, deep in the snowy mountains of occupied Korea, an impoverished local hunter on the brink of starvation saves a young Japanese officer from an attacking tiger. Through this one act, the fates of these two men are connected, unfolding a saga that spans half a century.

In an act of desperation, a young girl named Jade is sold by her family to a courtesan school. This will cement her place in the lowest social status. When she befriends an orphan boy named JungHo, who scrapes together a living begging on the streets of Seoul, they form a deep friendship. As the two come of age, JungHo is swept up in the revolutionary fight for independence, while Jade becomes a sought-after performer.

This novel “unveils a world where friends become enemies, enemies become saviors, heroes are persecuted, and beasts take many shapes.”

Book Summary

Named a New York Times “Notable Book of 2020,” and released on the 75th anniversary of the US dropping the nuclear bomb that decimated Hiroshima, Fallout is an engrossing non-fiction detective story, as well as an important piece of hidden history that shows how one heroic scoop saved—and can still save—the world.

Immediately after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US government began a secret propaganda and information suppression campaign to hide the truth about the devastating effects of nuclear weapons. Occupation forces closed the two cities to Allied reporters, preventing leaks about the horrific long-term effects of radiation which killed thousands during the months after the blast. 

For nearly a year, the cover-up worked – until New Yorker journalist John Hersey got into Hiroshima and managed to report the truth to the world. Even his fellow reporters didn’t know about his work until it was published in the magazine in August of 1946. 

In Fallout, Blume reveals how Hershey courageously uncovered and reported on one of the deadliest cover-ups of the 20th century. His revelations about the true effects of the atomic bomb provided one of the greatest deterrents to ever using the weapons again, thereby potentially saving millions of lives. 

Book Summary

Green Island blends the story of Taiwan with the story of the Tsai family. The narrator is born in 1947 on the night of the 228 massacre (also called the February 28 massacre), just as the country enters martial law. Her father is soon thrown in prison as Chinese Nationalists try to stop any resistance to their takeover.

A decade later, he returns after suffering brutal and inhuman conditions. His family and community alienate him and worry he is putting his younger daughter at risk as their relationship grows. Later as a mother, she’s also forced to decide between what is right and what can save her family.

This heavy book covers six decades of post-war Taiwan, from the end of Japanese rule through Chinese martial law (1947-1990) and eventually into democracy.

Book Summary

In the early 1900s, teenage Sunja meets a wealthy man near her seaside home in Korea and becomes pregnant, only to discover that the man is married. He attempts to buy her off, but she instead accepts another man’s offer and follows him to Japan, where they are discriminated against both for being Korean and Christian.

Sunja’s decision to leave her home, and reject her son’s powerful father, sets the stage for this epic novel that follows four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family in 20th-century Japan. It is a history of one family and a political history of the relationship between Japanese and Koreans throughout the 1900s.

Book Summary

Convenience Store Woman is a 2016 award-winning Japanese novella. Keiko never felt like she fit in, at home or at school. But at 18, she began working at Smile Mart. The store’s procedure manual helps guide all her interactions and even her clothing. She loves feeling “normal” at the store and has worked there for 18 years – about 17 years longer than the average Smile Mart employee.

At age 36, she feels societal pressure to make big changes – like finding a husband and getting a “proper” job.

The author based this contemporary novella on her own experience working at the convenience store chain, which explains how she was able to perfectly capture the atmosphere of this store, which is a familiar part of life in Japan. From a Western perspective, we might picture grabbing an occasional drink, candy bar, or a not-so-great hot dog at the gas station, but convenience stores in Japan are completely different. Not only do they provide a wide variety of freshly-made food that people rely on daily, but Japan’s convenience stores are also a central part of everyday life.

This short book (just 163 pages) is a very quick read that provides a sharp social commentary on conformity and was a huge hit in Japan before being translated into English. This book is darkly comic and offbeat – both in story and structure.

Book Summary

Do you want something very different to read? This unique pick from the mountains of northern Mongolia might be for you.

The first and only member of the Tuvans to use written language to tell stories, Galsan Tschinag chronicles their traditions in this fascinating, bittersweet novel about a shepherd boy’s coming of age.