[Book Review] Wings of a Flying Tiger, by Iris Yang

Title: Wings of a Flying Tiger
Author: Iris Yang (Qing Yang)
Publisher: Open Books
Publication Date: 06 September 2018

Even though it's fiction, this book is brutal. Many first-time authors tend to mollycoddle their characters; although it's clear she loves her characters dearly, Iris Yang is not one of those authors. It's rare to find a writer who intersperses moments of loving tenderness and peaceful village life with horrific scenes of bloody warfare, mass execution, and rape, and does it in a way that makes narrative sense and feels believable. But somehow, Iris Yang makes the whole story come together in a tapestry of war, heroism, violence, love, life, and death.

Very early on, it becomes clear that this story will be less about narrow escapes and more about how humans carry on even after the worst has happened. Plans go wrong, hopes are dashed, and minor characters die by the truckload. But through it all, there is a spirit of perseverance, a sense of the importance of holding onto life and hope despite overwhelming odds, if only to make oneself that much harder for the enemy to kill. This nameless characteristic seems uniquely Chinese to me; it's probably what allowed them to survive the war and the Japanese occupation, and all that came after it.

The very first character we meet is Danny Hardy, a fighter pilot of the First American Volunteer Group (AVG) of the Chinese Air Force (nicknamed "the Flying Tigers"), but we don't really get to know him until Act 2. The story mainly follows Jasmine Bai, the educated daughter of two professors at Nanking University, on the eve of the infamous Rape of Nanking by Japanese soldiers. From the moment Jasmine gets off the train, it's clear that China's wartime capitol is in desperate shape: her car is immediately swamped with refugees going the other way, and Jasmine has to crawl through a window to get out. From that moment on, everything that can go wrong, does. Japanese soldiers sack the city, using Chinese POWs for bayonet practice and brutally raping every young Chinese woman or girl they can lay their hands on. The city is a bloodbath, and only through a combination of luck and brave protectors does Jasmine make it out alive. She and her teenage cousin Daisy Bai are sent to a tiny mountain village in southwestern Yunnan Province for their own protection, and it is there that the two young women save the life of the aforementioned pilot Danny Hardy. Their decision to heal his wounds and hide him from Japanese soldiers will have terrible consequences for the young women, and for the villagers who harbor them.

If you're looking for an interesting perspective on an aspect of World War II and Chinese-American relations that is rarely discussed in this era of rising tensions between the two superpowers, then Wings of a Flying Tiger will take you on a wrenching-but-powerful emotional journey. I can't wait to read the sequel!

A Dot Labelled "Peter Pettigrew"

(SPOILER WARNING: Obviously, this post contains spoilers for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and basically all other books/films in the Harry Potter franchise.)

Okay wizards and witches, it's fan-theory time. Today we're addressing that age-old continuity conundrum, "Why didn't Fred and George Weasley notice in their Marauder's Map that there was a little dot labelled 'Peter Pettigrew' following their little brother around and sleeping in his bed?" Fear not, Gentle Readers: I propose a solution which may explain not only this, but other apparent continuity errors as well.

The reason Fred and George never noticed that the little dot labelled "Peter Pettigrew" in Ron's bed is because Peter Pettigrew was not his name at that time.

How did that sleazy little creep get Sorted into Gryffindor, though?

After living as a rat for twelve years, Pettigrew was Scabbers for all intents and purposes. No one had called him anything but Scabbers in more than a decade, and as far as we know he had never, in all that time, broken character . It makes sense that he would have come to inhabit the role completely, thinking of himself as Scabbers (if he thought of himself at all, and didn't simply go on autopilot and let his rat instincts take over). But when news of Sirius' escape from Azkaban reached him, something shifted in his little rodent mind, and he began to remember the reason he had been living as a rat for all those years. The guilt came rushing back, and so perforce did the memories of what he had done, why he had hidden for so long.

According to the Marauder's Map Fact File on Pottermore, the Marauder's Map "[s]hows the location of any person or ghost on Hogwarts' grounds, [and] isn’t fooled by an Animagus or an Invisibility Cloak." It says nothing about animals or non-sentient beings, and given that Harry never specifically mentions seeing anything other then humans and ghosts in the map, it's reasonable to assume that the map only shows sentient beings. This makes sense from a user experience standpoint. Think about it: if the map showed every organism in Hogwarts, the interface would be overloaded with useless information about the position of every mouse, spider, and fruit-fly in the castle, making it much more difficult for the user to filter out the important information.

If the above is true (and I'll admit, that's a big "if"), then that also explains why Fred and George never noticed a long thin shape labelled "Slytherin's Monster" slithering through the walls during Chamber of Secrets. Being a non-sentient creature without a unique name that it was aware of, the basilisk thus did not show up on the Marauder's Map.

This theory also supported by the movie-only scene in Alfonso Cuaron's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, in which Harry sees a dot labelled "Peter Pettigrew" in the Marauder's Map which is moving towards him down a dark and (apparently empty) hallway. Harry never actually sees Pettigrew on the map in the book, but if we take this scene as canon, it suggests that by this point Pettigrew had started to remember who he was, and the map re-labelled him accordingly.

Now don't worry, I can hear your objections already. "But why didn't the map say 'Helena Ravenclaw' instead of 'The Grey Lady'? Why didn't it show Voldemort standing next to Quirrel?" Both excellent questions, Astute Reader. I shall endeavor to answer them as best I can. First, Helena Ravenclaw did not show up on the map for precisely the reasons mentioned in my theory: she had been known as the "Grey Lady" for so long (nearly a thousand years) that she had internalized the name and considered it her own.

As for Voldemort, I can't say for sure. If the map shows ghosts, then one could reasonably assume that the Dark Lord would show up as well, right? Not necessarily. When Voldemort returns to life near the end of Goblet of Fire, he says to his Death Eaters that when the spell he intended to kill Harry with rebounded, "I was ripped from my body, less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost … but still, I was alive. What I was, even I do not know … "

Whatever was left of Voldemort may have been too little for the map to recognize as sentient, or it may have been masked by Quirrel's life-force. Finally, (and this may be a bit of a stretch), Voldemort is often known as "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named", so maybe his name itself was under some sort of concealing enchantment which makes it not show up on all but the most powerful detection systems, sort of like the nominal equivalent of being Unplottable? We know that he has the power to make his name Taboo, so making it Unplottable as well doesn't seem like too much of a stretch.

Though the above theory is obviously not canon, I hope that it can help to clear up any issues you may have had with the illustrious Ms. Rowling's storytelling.

Until next time... mischief managed.

[Book Review] The Year of Less, by Cait Flanders

The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store
Author: Cait Flanders
Recording Artist: Cait Flanders
Publisher: Tantor Media
Year: 2017

I think it's fair to say that, for most people living in the so-called First World, the idea of going an entire year without purchasing anything but food and essentials is a pretty terrifying prospect. You're probably already tensed up just thinking about it. Not buying anything? No lattes to-go, no new video games or DVDs, no new outfits or tickets to movies or anything at all?! How would we live? What would we do? How could we survive the howling maelstrom of sensation that is the Internet Age without the ability to spend our hard-earned cash on the things that matter most to us, the things which give our lives so much fulfillment?

Well, that's just the issue, isn't it? What does matter most to us? Do our possessions bring us fulfillment? Do we even remember all the junk we've spent that hard-earned cash on? Lots of people run themselves ragged working jobs they hate so they can pay their bills every month, but are we paying for things that make us truly happy and secure? Or are we just flinging dollars away to keep the twin specters of Boredom and Silence at bay, like a cornered man hurling sausage-links at an approaching pack of wild dogs?

By her early twenties, Cait Flanders was (like many Americans and Canadians), up to her eyeballs in debt. More than $30,000 of debt, and almost all of it racked up to pay for things, possessions, physical objects which brought her no joy but she couldn't bear to get part with because she had spent so much on them already, and besides, someday she might use them! Add to this her binge-eating and compulsive blackout drinking (which started at age 12), and you've got one very unlikely candidate for future financial- and lifestyle-guru. But become a guru she did! This book chronicles how that came about.

Cait started blogging about her efforts to pay off her consumer debt as a way to keep herself accountable. Publicly sharing her budget and what she spent her money on forced her to stick to her principles and continually reach for her goals, or else face the unpleasant task of explaining to her readers why she had fallen short that month. Slowly, over the course of two years, she paid off her debt and built up a sizable online following. But she discovered that as soon as the debt was gone, the old habits came roaring back. She began to ask herself:

"If I was only saving up to 10 percent of my income, where was the rest of my money going? Why was I continually making excuses for my spending? Did I really need 90 percent of my income or could I live on less?"

Cait decided to find out, in the only way she knew how: by leaping in with both feet. She decided to challenge herself to give up shopping for an entire year, only allowing herself to buy the essentials: food, toiletries, gasoline, electricity, and other essential consumables. Among other things, she had a rule that she could only replace things that wore out or broke if both of the following applied: A) the item was absolutely essential and caused her a daily inconvenience to go without it, and B) she threw out, donated, or otherwise got rid of the original item she was replacing. Armed with a sense of purpose and spurred on by the fear of public shaming (she had told everyone she knew about her plan, so she wouldn't chicken out), Cait launched into a yearlong Shopping Ban.

Not only did Cait swear to go a year without shopping, she also decided to take stock of every item she owned and publish the inventory on her blog. Years before Marie Kondo was a phenomenon, Cait decided she'd had enough and ultimately gave away more than half of her possessions, on top of her Shopping Ban!

As the year wore on, Cait began to notice disturbing similarities in the way she related to her three vices: food, alcohol, and shopping. Although I've never had a serious problem with alcohol, shopping, or overeating, I still found that much of what she was saying resonated with me. For much of our twenties, my wife and I spent everything we earned on fancy dinners out, having adventures with friends, sweet treats and cups of overpriced coffee, and purchasing whatever passing fancy caught our attention for more than a moment. We were having fun, sure, but spending all that money was really just keeping us from achieving our goals, like owning a house or traveling.

Although we had already paid off the all of our remaining debt more than a year before encountering Ms. Flanders' book, The Year of Less has helped to reinforce and galvanize us in our decision to live frugally, to save as much as possible, and to not waste our money on anything that isn't getting us closer to checking items off our bucket-list. It's a difficult decision to make in a world where anything you want can be yours in seconds (and with free shipping if you spend just a few dollars more), but as Cait Flanders proves, it can be done.

And who knows? Maybe, like her, you'll find that you're happier with less than you ever were with more.