Asian America

Jessica O’Brien

Professor Hattori

AAS 220 Mon/Wed 9:30

10/31/2011

The Asian American Welsh Man

  Peter Ho Davies, the author of The Welsh Girl, The Ugliest House in the World, and Equal Love, was born to parents of welsh and Chinese decent and he was  raised in Coventry, Britain. He moved to the United States in 1992 to pursue his MA at Boston University. Most of his works reflect the lavishly painted world of the Welsh country side; he also submitted his first work when he was eight-teen years old. He has also won several awards for his work including the Oregon Book Award, the MacMillan Silver PEN Award, and the John Llewellyn Prize. Davies has also been on the New York Times Notable Book of the Year list. He is known for writing about many different topics for different points of view and even different time periods. Peter Ho Davies creates very lush and vibrant worlds, whether it is a small ugly house or the epic backdrop of World War II Wales

    Peter Ho Davies was born in Coventry, Britain in 1966 to parents of welsh and Chinese decent. As a child of two very different cultures, he is not afraid to explore both his Chinese and his welsh heritage through his writing. In fact most of his stories seem to center around the welsh country side in the 19th and 20th centuries, one of the stories that he wrote was about an uncle who was Chinese who drowned in an earthenware jar.  During Davies childhood years one of his favorite genres was science fiction, when he was thirteen a book that he read was titled Who Reads Science Fiction.  When he was eight-teen years old he submitted his first short story recounted how his grandmother became senile. Davies describe the book as "the most emotionally charged work I'd ever written." (Davies) Peter Ho Davies was always a person of many interests he went to three schools. The first was Manchester University where he studied English, then he went to Cambridge to study physics, and finally he went to Boston university to get his MA for creative writing

    One of the most interesting things about this writer is that while he has always stayed true to his roots he has never concerned himself with identity.     "'I think a lot of us feel torn between multiple identities: am I this, am I that? The truth is we're often made up of these competing influences." Davies started off his career in writing short stories; it is also within this genre that he has gained most of his notoriety and fame. His short stories are in a sense sometimes written like a novel. In the Ugliest House in the World there a series of short stories but most of them are told from the point of view of a young doctor who is visiting family and friends in Wales. One of the most common themes that we often see in his short stories are the relationships between parents and children, particularly fathers and sons. In Equal Love there is a story of a son preparing a very expense funeral for his Chinese father. We see in the book that in his life the father did not express his love for his son very often, and it is on his father’s death bed does the son realize how much his father meant to him.

   The first novel that he produced was titled The Welsh Girl, a story about the adventurous Esther who grows up with her exceedingly strict father during World War II.  In this novel we also meet Karstan, a prisoner of war, who is having a difficult time trying to figure out what he is responsible for, and what is the right thing to do. There is even a characterization of the infamous Rudolf Hess, the Nazi whose interrogation answers left many interrogators confused. Growing up peter ho Davis's parents never told many stories, so when it came time to write this novel everything in this book from sheep herding to the Nazi campaigns had to be researched. It is within the pages of this book that we see Davies going in depth and exploring his welsh culture with the upmost attention to detail. It is in this novel that we are exposed to the theme of responsibility, and the question, who is responsible for what? "How responsible are we for things being done in our name, supposedly to protect us? When something like Abu Grahib happens, how responsible is everybody ...for that?" (Davies) In the book we see Esther contemplating whether she or the solider is responsible for her rape, and we see Karstan trying to figure out if he is responsible for defiling the honor of his fellow soldiers or if he is responsible for saving their lives.

    Peter Ho Davies is one of the most under celebrated and underappreciated Asian American authors of our time.  He is an author who is not afraid to go the distance in order to find himself, but he is also not afraid to switch his identities.  In one of his interviews he states that writing often comes from a place of vulnerability. "It's that moment in the playground where someone has cracked a joke at your expense and you don't have the comeback line, but then five minutes or an hour or years later you think, "Oh I should just have said that!" and there is a sense of vulnerability in his writing. While reading one of his works we can see that the author has really dug deep and has tried to find a way to connect himself to each and every one of his characters.  There are few authors who describe his settings as well as he does. In The Welsh Girl the reader is able to visualize the green rolling hills of Wales and we feel for the beautifully rendered characters that populate his world. Throughout each of his works there is a level of excellence that I have come to expect from only the greatest authors.

Works Cited

"Interview: Peter Ho Davies." Interview by Bierlein Stacy. Web Del Sol. Other Voices. Web. 1 Nov. 2011. <http://www.webdelsol.com/Other_Voices/DaviesInt.htm>.

"Interview With Peter Ho Davies." Interview. The Virginia Quarterly Review: A National Journal of Literature and Discussion. University of Virginia. Web. 1 Nov. 2011. <http://www.vqronline.org/webexclusive/2004/06/15/davies-interview/>.

"On the Sly." Interview. The Atlantic. The Atlantic Monthly Company, 16 Dec. 1998. Web. 1 Nov. 2011. <http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/factfict/ff9812.htm>.

AAS 220 Asian American Author Review Three: The Welsh Girls

Jessica O’Brien

AAS 220

10/16/11

The Welsh Girl

   The book that I chose to review is Peter Ho Davies’s The Welsh Girl. The story mainly revolves around three central characters.  The main character is Esther Williams, a young seventeen-year-old girl who is desperate to get out of her secluded Welsh village and see the world.  Another character who we follow is Karstan an eighteen year old Nazi who, in order to save his fellow soldiers, has surrendered to the British army and is now in a prisoner of war camp. It is here that Karstan begins to contemplate what honor means to him and this is where he meets Esther. Finally we meet Rotheram a German Jew who has fled to England, and now finds himself interrogating Rudolf Hess. The book its self is entertaining, however this is Peter Ho Davies first full-length novel and there are definitely some things that he could he done better.  Esther is a very interesting character; she has a thirst for knowledge of the world and a need for excitement, however her love life is very confusing. While Esther is a very entertaining character the ones that really steal the show are Karstan and Rotheram. Karstan is a young newly enlisted solider who is deeply respected by his men. However, when a life or death decision is upon him he chooses surrender in order to save himself and his men. Rotheram is in many ways a foil to Karstan, he is a German Jew who has fled to Britain with his mother he is now a subject to Rudolf Hess’s mind games and is beginning to question where his loyalties lie.

   When we first meet Esther she is a barmaid working in a pub located in a small village in Wales.  There she meets an English solider named Colin, at first things seem to go well between the two of them, but then things go very badly, and she becomes pregnant.  After this we find out about two other men she was in love with, one is Eric who was an evacuee who later died after returning home, and the other is Rhys, a farmhand who enlists and is labeled as missing in action and presumed dead. Then later on in the book we meet Karstan. Through out the book she is at war with her self on who the father of the child is, Rhys or Colin. At the end of the book that we find out who the father is, and when she does reveal the father there is no lead up as to how the conclusion could make sense.  She also seems to change who she is in love with per chapter. At first she seems as if she is leaning more toward having an abortion, but then once again, she changes her mind again and decides to keep the child. One of the things that was enticing about the revelation scene is that when she tells her father it is very mater of fact, and it is a huge breakthrough of emotion for her father’s character.

   Karstan is certainly one of the more interesting characters.  Karstan is constantly in turmoil thinking about whether his surrender was the right thing to do, and what his mother will think of him. He also has a great deal of respect for his men, and he cares for them even while he is in the camp. It is while he is there that he meets Esther.  She talks to him only for a moment but it is enough to leave him infatuated. The relationship of Karstan and Esther is very one sided at this point. Esther is now trying to figure out so many other things in her life, and Karstan is really only trying to work on himself, leaving him with more time to think about a relationship. Another person he meets is with a young British evacuee, Jim, who is currently living with Esther. Karstan sees Jim as both a playmate and as his outside connection to Esther. The author uses this character to talk about the idea of freedom. There is one chapter where Karstan escapes and he talks about how the moment that he got out of the camp was wonderful, but after that he begins to feel the burdens of freedom. He then decides that freedom does not necessarily mean physical freedom but something much more. The only problem that remains with this character is that he seems very stoic where he should be more emotional, such as the scene where he sees battle for the first time.

  Like the other characters of this story Rotheram finds himself in a strange predicament, he is a German Jew in the British Army interrogating Rudolf Hess. Rotheram has tried for years to cover up his German background, and to become British.  In one scene he is elated when he is denied service at Esther’s pub because the owner thinks he is British. Then he is given an assignment to interrogate Rudolf Hess, who is notorious for either faking amnesia or was actually afflicted by the disease. It is at this point that Hess tries to unravel Rotheram, who in the end remains proud of his British roots. However it is not until the end of the novel where he is given the task of investigating Karstan’s escape, do we see him attached to the other two main characters. It is almost as if the author has written two stories that suddenly combined at the end.

   This story is a beautiful written story. The Welsh Girl tells us the story of love, trust, and defines meaning of honor.  Even with all of its faults the book remains a wonderful story about people, the mistakes they make, and the things that they do in order to redeem those mistakes.   In this book we are given three very well written and very defined characters along with other side characters that create a wonderful, vibrant vision of World War Two.

Works Cited

Davies, Peter Ho. The Welsh Girl. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Print.

AAS 220: Asian American Author Annotated Bibliography

Davies, Peter Ho. The Welsh Girl. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Print.

The Welsh Girl is a novel about a young girl, the seventeen year old Esther, who is kept in her confined mountain village by her over protective father. While she woks as a barmaid, Esther dreams of the dangerous world that she hears of on the BBC broadcast channel. The time is World War Two, it is at this period that Esther gets her first contact to the outside world through a prisoner of war camp that is set up outside of her village. It is there that she meets Karstan A young german officer who is in the midst for figuring out what honor and freedom mean to him, it is durring this time that the two fall in love. The main parts of the book are told through the point of views of Esther, Karstan, and Rotheram a interrogator sent to talk to Herman Hess. The book covers many themes such as love, war, and understanding. in the beginning Karstan and Esther do not even speak the same language, how ever once they come to understand both each other and their languages the two of them begin to fall in love. One of the other themes that the book is war, we see how it is that war makes people question what is right and wrong, and causes us to question what is honor?

Davies, Peter Ho. The Ugliest House in the World: Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Print.

The Ugliest House on the Left is a compilation of short stories. The stories seem to be mostly about the relationships between fathers and sons. A great deal of them talk about growing up and almost all of them take place in the Welsh country side. The first part of the book titled the Ugliest House in the World, follows a young man on his trip to see his father in wales through a series of short stories. In these stories we meet Kate, Her six-year -old son Gareth, and the narrators father. The second half of the book seems to cover a number of different topics such as war and suicide. one of the last stories is the story of a man who, after the death of his daughter, begins to volunteer for a suicide life line, it is there that he meets Mary a transvestite, the two of them begin to talk and they become fast friends. One theme that all of the stories have in common is the theme of death. in most of his stories we see the characters either dealing with the oncoming death of a loved one or in one case the death of an identity.

Davies, Peter Ho. Equal Love. London: Granta, 2000. Print.

One of the largest themes is the book Equal Love, is family. in each of he stories there is always some mention of family. The very first story is about about a mixed race couple who are trying to start a family, but have been having some problems. until they see an unidentified flying object. another one of the stories depicts a girl, who's parents had just been divorced , watches her father perform dental surgeries on other children. Peter Ho Davies seems to think that family is a very important element. in almost all of his stories we hear about families particularly in the connections between parents and children. Like his other works death plays a crucial roll in these stories. In the second story we see the father crying over the death of a patient, and in another we see a son putting on a very expensive funeral for his father who had been the owner of the chinese newspaper on the west coast. In this story we see a son reflecting on his relationship with his father during his fathers funeral, it is there that he realizes that he has always loved his father and that his father had always loved him.

Asian American Author

Peter Ho Davies

Davies, Peter Ho. Equal Love. London: Granta,2001.Print.
Davies, Peter Ho. The Ugliest House in the World: Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Print.
Davies, Peter Ho. The Welsh Girl. Boston; Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Print.

AAS 220 F11: Jessie O'Brien