Gil Asakawa's

WRITING SAMPLES

BOOK REVIEWS

Back to Index of Writing Samples

Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia
By Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Alfred Knopf, 360 pp. $27.50

Anyone who is interested in Asian culture or business has a vested interest in the late-1990s financial crisis, sparked by a real estate crash in Thailand and which spread like a flu across the region, ultimately affecting world powers such as India, Korea and Japan.

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn take a long and well-structured look at the crisis and its wake, predicting that the new Asia will be stronger and become a world economic powerhouse, eclipsing the Western countries. The authors know Asia well - they're a husband and wife team of New York Times journalists who won a Pulitzer in 1990 for their coverage of the Tiananmen Square student democracy protest, and authors of "China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power."

The premise of "Thunder from the East" is that the financial crisis was the best thing that could have happened to Asia. Like a natural forest fire or the long-term process of evolution, the "Asian contagion" fell sickly companies and exposed government waste and corruption, and is allowing - nay, forcing -- a hearty breed of entrepreneurs to sprout in its wake and take advantage of Asia's long-standing but in recent years, moribund, traditions of hard work and leadership.

The book begins with a chilling scene in Indonesia where villagers have beheaded a "sorcerer" who they believe is partly responsible for the wretched economy and dire times. While Kristoff describes the gruesome scene, juxtaposed with the smiling friendliness of the locals towards those they don't think are the evil sorcerers. The format of the book - Kristoff and WuDunn's analysis and commentary splashed against the backdrop of scenes painted with first-person reportage - is established immediately.

The two tackle individual chapters, but with the same voice: They travel throughout Asia, meeting real people (almost everyone they interview is described with a verbal snapshot of his or her hair and face) in real situations. Then they take the situations and step back to insert historical context and their opinions. They share gut-wrenching stories of the poorest villagers, but also profile the other end of the spectrum. The book introduces a Bangkok real estate mogul who suddenly finds himself selling sandwiches from a street cart, and the couple also interviews such notable players as South Korea's deputy prime minister for economic affairs, Kang Kyong Shik, who was blamed for his country's economic collapse and was even imprisoned, and the shining star of Japan's future economy, Masayoshi Son, head of the technology venture capital giant Softbank..

Throughout, the authors evoke the hard-to-imagine gap between the wealth and modernity of the Asia most of the world knows, and the Asia where villagers die for lack of basic medicine or eat bark for food. They probe the reality of lives that are so bleak that selling a daughter into prostitution or sending a child off to a Nike sweatshop represents a chance at a better life.

WuDunn came across a family in the jungles of Cambodia where the smartest son has died of malaria because the father couldn't afford a $5 mosquito net that may have saved him, and then has an epiphany about an earlier meeting with a young girl whose stepfather sold her as a prostitute to use the money to save her sisters and mother.

"What overwhelmed me was the waste: Kasiet had died for want of a few dollars, roughly the price of my bottled water that day. And unless Yok Yorn could raise a bit of cash, more of his kids might very well be dead I another year or two.

"So as I stood there awkwardly, embarrassed at invading a family's grief, thinking of my own children, a disturbing thought kept surfacing in the back of my mind, rising again no matter how many times I tried to slap it down: Why not sell the teenage daughter who had spoken to me and save the rest of the children?"

(In this instance, there is some good news in a footnote: The story of Kaiset's death ran in the New York Times and a Cambodian publisher started a program to raise money to buy mosquito nets for the poor.)

One of the most compelling chapters switches back-and-froth between the depressed town of Omiya, where Kristoff meets various shopkeepers and business owners who face shutting down their livelihoods, and a ritzy, exclusive Tokyo restaurant where the authors and a new Times editor sit through an over-the-top extravagant meal that cost almost $1,000 per person. The restaurant is a symbol for what was wrong with Japan's economy before the crisis, a symbol of waste where businessmen and politicos could throw money around and be entertained by geisha at the expense of shareholders and less fortunate citizens alike.

"The ninth course was a dessert, fruits, served on Kenzan golden chrysanthemum platters first made by the eighteenth century potter Kenzan Ogata. The platters were works of art and so was the food," Kristoff writes. "The melons were sweet as candy, soft as yogurt, and ludicrously ocerpriced. Japan has a soft spot for melons, and prices soar into the stratosphere. The ones we ate at Kiccho probably cost about $100 each, but the very best much ore than that."

Both authors sometimes write as if their journalistic credentials make them uncomfortable stating opinions, and insert "I think…" or "it seems to me that…," making the prose noticeably clunky from time to time. But that's mostly the fault of Knopf's editing, which seems sloppy and inattentive. The book would probably have been well-served by a once-over by the couple's Times copy editors.

Still, "Thunder from the East" is a solid and smart read, and a timely and essential primer to the fast-developing evolution of Asia's economy. There's no doubt that Asia is rising, and Kristof and WuDunn capture it as the phoenix is just starting to test its wings.

This review was published in the Rocky Mountain News, 2000.